Wahhabism (Arabic: وهابية‎, Wahhābiya(h)) or Wahhabi mission[1] (/wəˈhɑːbi, wɑː-/;[2]Arabic: ألدعوة ألوهابية‎, ad-Da'wa al-Wahhābiya(h) ) is a religious movement or branch of Sunni Islam.[3][4][5][6] It has been variously described as "orthodox", "ultraconservative",[7] "austere",[3] Critics say that Wahhabism's rigidity has led it to misinterpret and distort Islam, pointing to extremists such as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. ISIS or ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria /the Levant, also draws on Wahhabism for its ideology.[8] Wahhabism's explosive growth began in the 1970s when Saudi charities started funding Wahhabi schools (madrassas) and mosques from Islamabad to Culver City, California. It has been described as "fundamentalist",[9] "puritanical"[10] (or "puritan");[11] as an Islamic "reform movement" to restore "pure monotheistic worship" (tawhid), by scholars and advocates[12] and as an "extremist pseudo-Sunni movement" by opponents.[13] Adherents often object to the terms "Wahhabi" and "Wahhabism" as derogatory, and prefer to be called Salafi or muwahhid.[14][15][16]

The name Wahhabism stems from the eighteenth-century preacher and scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).[17] He started a revivalist movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd,[18] advocating a purging of practices such as the popular "cult of saints", and shrine and tomb visitation, widespread among Muslims, but which he considered idolatry, impurities and innovations in Islam.[5][19] Eventually he formed a pact with a local leader Muhammad bin Saud offering political obedience and promising that protection and propagation of the Wahhabi movement would mean "power and glory" and rule of "lands and men."[20] The movement centers on the principle of tawhid,[21] or the "uniqueness" and "unity" of God.[19] The movement also draws from the teachings of medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah and early jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal.[22]

The alliance between followers of ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud's successors (the House of Saud) proved to be rather durable. The house of bin Saud continued to maintain its politico-religious alliance with the Wahhabi sect through the waxing and waning of its own political fortunes over the next 150 years, through to its eventual proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, and then afterwards, on into modern times. As of 2015[update] Mohammed bin Abd Al-Wahhab's teachings are state-sponsored and are the official form of Sunni Islam[3][23] in 21st-century Saudi Arabia.[24]

Wahhabis are the "dominant minority" in Saudi Arabia.[25] There are 4 million Saudi Wahhabis (concentrated in Najd) representing 22.9% of the population.[24][26] With the help of funding from petroleum exports[27] (and other factors[28]), the movement underwent "explosive growth" beginning in the 1970s and now has worldwide influence.[3] Wahhabism has been accused of being "a source of global terrorism",[29][30] and for causing disunity in the Muslim community by labeling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates[31] (takfir), thus paving the way for their bloodshed.[32][33][34] It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazaars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.[35][36][37] The "boundaries" of what make up Wahhabism have been called (by Youssef Michel Ibrahim) "difficult to pinpoint",[38] but in contemporary usage, the terms Wahhabi and Salafi are often used interchangeably, and the groups they represent are considered to be movements with different roots that have merged since the 1960s.[39][40][41] But Wahhabism has also been called "a particular orientation within Salafism",[5] or an ultra-conservative, Saudi brand of Salafism.[42][43]

"a corpus of doctrines", and "a set of attitudes and behavior, derived from the teachings of a particularly severe religious reformist who lived in central Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century" (Gilles Kepel)[44]

"pure Islam" (David Commins, paraphrasing supporters' definition),[45] that does not deviate from Sharia law in any way and should be called Islam and not Wahhabism. (King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the King of the Saudi Arabia)[15]

"a conservative reform movement ... the creed upon which the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded, and [which] has influenced Islamic movements worldwide" (Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim world)[46]

"a sect dominant in Saudi Arabia and Qatar" with footholds in "India, Africa, and elsewhere", with a "steadfastly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in the tradition of Ibn Hanbal" (Cyril Glasse)[21]

originally a "literal revivification" of Islamic principles that ignored the spiritual side of Islam, that "rose on the wings of enthusiasm апd longing and then sank down into the lowlands of pharisaic self-righteousness" after gaining power and losing its "longing and humility" (Muhammad Asad)[48]

"a political trend" within Islam that "has been adopted for power-sharing purposes", but cannot be called a sect because "It has no special practices, nor special rites, and no special interpretation of religion that differ from the main body of Sunni Islam" (Abdallah Al Obeid, the former dean of the Islamic University of Medina and member of the Saudi Consultative Council)[38]

"the true salafist movement". Starting out as a theological reform movement, it had "the goal of calling (da'wa) people to restore the 'real' meaning of tawhid (oneness of God or monotheism) and to disregard and deconstruct 'traditional' disciplines and practices that evolved in Islamic history such as theology and jurisprudence and the traditions of visiting tombs and shrines of venerated individuals." (Ahmad Moussalli)[49]

a term used by opponents of Salafism in hopes of besmirching that movement by suggesting foreign influence and "conjuring up images of Saudi Arabia". The term is "most frequently used in countries where Salafis are a small minority" of the Muslim community but "have made recent inroads" in "converting" the local population to Salafism. (Quintan Wiktorowicz)[14]

a blanket term used inaccurately to refer to "any Islamic movement that has an apparent tendency toward misogyny, militantism, extremism, or strict and literal interpretation of the Quran and hadith" (Natana J. DeLong-Bas)[50]

According to Saudi writer Abdul Aziz Qassim and others, it was the Ottomans who "first labelled Abdul Wahhab's school of Islam in Saudi Arabia as Wahhabism". The British also adopted it and expanded its use in the Middle East.[51]

Wahhabis do not like—or at least did not like—the term. Ibn Abd-Al-Wahhab was averse to the elevation of scholars and other individuals, including using a person's name to label an Islamic school.[14][32][52]

According to Robert Lacey "the Wahhabis have always disliked the name customarily given to them" and preferred to be called Muwahhidun (Unitarians). Another preferred term was simply "Muslims" since their creed is "pure Islam".[53] However, critics complain these terms imply non-Wahhabis are not monotheists or Muslims,[53][54] and the English translation of that term causes confusion with the Christian denomination (Unitarian Universalism).

Other terms Wahhabis have been said to use and/or prefer include ahl al-hadith ("people of hadith"), Salafi Da'wa or al-da'wa ila al-tawhid[55] ("Salafi preaching" or "preaching of monotheism", for the school rather than the adherents) or Ahl ul-Sunna wal Jama'a ("people of the tradition of Muhammad and the consensus of the Ummah"),[5] Ahl al-Sunnah ("People of the Sunna"),[56] or "the reform or Salafi movement of the Sheikh" (the sheikh being ibn Abdul-Wahhab).[57] Early Salafis referred to themselves simply as "Muslims", believing the neighboring Ottoman Caliphate was al-dawlah al-kufriyya (a heretical nation) and its self-professed Muslim inhabitants actually non-Muslim.[31][58][59][60] The prominent 20th-century Muslim scholar Nasiruddin Albani, who considered himself "of the Salaf," referred to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab's activities as "Najdi da'wah."[61]

Many, such as writer Quinton Wiktorowicz, urge use of the term Salafi, maintaining that "one would be hard pressed to find individuals who refer to themselves as Wahhabis or organizations that use 'Wahhabi' in their title, or refer to their ideology in this manner (unless they are speaking to a Western audience that is unfamiliar with Islamic terminology, and even then usage is limited and often appears as 'Salafi/Wahhabi')."[14] A New York Times journalist writes that Saudis "abhor" the term Wahhabism, "feeling it sets them apart and contradicts the notion that Islam is a monolithic faith."[62] Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud for example has attacked the term as "a doctrine that doesn't exist here (Saudi Arabia)" and challenged users of the term to locate any "deviance of the form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia from the teachings of the Quran and Prophetic Hadiths".[63][64]Ingrid Mattson argues that, "'Wahhbism' is not a sect. It is a social movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islam of rigid cultural practices that had (been) acquired over the centuries."[65][66][Note 1] Another source criticized the use of the word for its confusion, as it has different meanings to different groups. In South Asia, Deobandis call the Ahle Hadith "Wahhabis", while Barelvis call Deobandis "Wahhabis."[68]

On the other hand, according to authors at Global Security and Library of Congress the term is now commonplace and used even by Wahhabi scholars[who?] in the Najd,[5][69] a region often called the "heartland" of Wahhabism.[70] Journalist Karen House calls Salafi, "a more politically correct term" for Wahhabi.[71]

In any case, according to Lacey, none of the other terms have caught on, and so like the Christian Quakers, Wahhabis have "remained known by the name first assigned to them by their detractors."[72]

Many scholars and critics distinguish between Wahhabi and Salafi. According to American scholar Christopher M. Blanchard,[73] Wahhabism refers to "a conservative Islamic creed centered in and emanating from Saudi Arabia," while Salafiyya is "a more general puritanical Islamic movement that has developed independently at various times and in various places in the Islamic world."[32]

However, many call Wahhabism a more strict, Saudi form of Salafi.[74][75] Wahhabism is the Saudi version of Salafism, according to Mark Durie, who states Saudi leaders "are active and diligent" using their considerable financial resources "in funding and promoting Salafism all around the world."[76] Ahmad Moussalli tends to agree Wahhabism is a subset of Salafism, saying "As a rule, all Wahhabis are salafists, but not all salafists are Wahhabis".[49]

Hamid Algar lists three "elements" Wahhabism and Salafism had in common.

"above all disdain for all developments subsequent to al-Salaf al-Salih (the first two or three generations of Islam),

"the abandonment of consistent adherence to one of the four Sunni Madhhabs (schools of fiqh).

And "two important and interrelated features" that distinguished Salafis from the Wahhabis:

"a reliance on attempts at persuasion rather than coercion in order to rally other Muslims to their cause; and

"an informed awareness of the political and socio-economic crises confronting the Muslim world.[54]

Hamid Algar and another critic, Khaled Abou El Fadl, argue Saudi oil-export funding "co-opted" the "symbolism and language of Salafism", during the 1960s and 70s, making them practically indistinguishable by the 1970s,[77] and now the two ideologies have "melded". Abou El Fadl believes Wahhabism rebranded itself as Salafism knowing it could not "spread in the modern Muslim world" as Wahhabism.[39]

The Wahhabi mission started as a revivalist movement in the remote, arid region of Najd. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Al Saud dynasty, and with it Wahhabism, spread to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. After the discovery of petroleum near the Persian Gulf in 1939, it had access to oil export revenues, revenue that grew to billions of dollars. This money—spent on books, media, schools, universities, mosques, scholarships, fellowships, lucrative jobs for journalists, academics and Islamic scholars—gave Wahhabism a "preeminent position of strength" in Islam around the world.[78]

In the country of Wahhabism's founding—and by far the largest and most powerful country where it is the state religion—Wahhabi ulama gained control over education, law, public morality and religious institutions in the 20th century, while permitting as a "trade-off" doctrinally objectionable actions such as the import of modern technology and communications, and dealings with non-Muslims, for the sake of the consolidation of the power of its political guardian, the Al Saud dynasty.[79]

However, in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century several crises worked to erode Wahhabi "credibility" in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world—the November 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque by militants; the deployment of US troops in Saudi during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq; and the 9/11 2001al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.[80]

In each case the Wahhabi establishment was called on to support the dynasty's efforts to suppress religious dissent—and in each case it did[80]—exposing its dependence on the Saudi dynasty and its often unpopular policies.[81][82]

In the West, the end of the Cold War and the anti-communist alliance with conservative, religious Saudi Arabia, and the 9/11 attacks created enormous distrust towards the kingdom and especially its official religion.[83]

The founder of Wahhabism, Mohammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, was born around 1700 in a small oasis town in the Najd region, in what is now central Saudi Arabia. He studied in Basra (in what is now Iraq)[84][85] and possibly Mecca and Medina while there to perform Hajj,[86][87] before returning to his home town of 'Uyayna in 1740. There he worked to spread (what he believed to be) the call (da'wa) for a restoration of true monotheistic worship,[88] purified of innovations, such as invoking or making vows to "holy men" or "saints". The "pivotal idea" of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching was that people who called themselves Muslims but who participated in such innovations were not just misguided or committing a sin, but were "outside the pale of Islam altogether," as were Muslims who disagreed with his definition. [89]

This included not just lax, unlettered, nomadic Bedu, but Shia, Sufi, and Ottomans.[90] Such infidels were not to be killed outright, but to be given a chance to repent first.[91][92]

With the support of the ruler of the town—Uthman ibn Mu'ammar—he carried out some of his religious reforms in 'Uyayna, including the demolition of the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab (one of the Sahaba (companions) of the prophet Muhammad), and the stoning to death of an adulterous woman.[93] However, a more powerful chief (Sulaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Ghurayr) pressured Uthman ibn Mu'ammar to expel him from 'Uyayna.[94]

The ruler of nearby town, Muhammad ibn Saud, invited ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab to join him, and in 1744 a pact was made between the two. [95] Ibn Saud would protect and propagate the doctrines of the Wahhabi mission, while ibn Abdul Wahhab "would support the ruler, supplying him with 'glory and power.'" Whoever championed his message, ibn Abdul Wahhab promised, "will, by means of it, rule the lands and men." [20] Ibn Saud would abandon un-Sharia taxation of local harvests, and in return God might compensate him with booty from conquest and sharia compliant taxes that would exceed what he gave up.[96] The alliance between the Wahhabi mission and Al Saud family has "endured for more than two and half centuries," surviving defeat and collapse.[95][97] The two families have intermarried multiple times over the years and in today's Saudi Arabia, the minister of religion is always a member of the Al ash-Sheikh family (i.e. a descendent of Ibn Abdul Wahhab).[98]

According to most sources, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab declared jihad against neighboring tribes, whose practices of praying to saints, making pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, he believed to be the work of idolaters/unbelievers. [33][54][91][99] (One academic disputes this. According to Natana DeLong-Bas, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was restrained in urging fighting with perceived unbelievers, preferring to preach and persuade rather than attack.[100][101][102] It was only after the death of Muhammad bin Saud in 1765 that, according to DeLong-Bas, Muhammad bin Saud's son and successor, Abdul-Aziz bin Muhammad, used a "convert or die" approach to expand his domain,[103] and when Wahhabis adopted the takfir ideas of Ibn Taymiyya.[104])

Conquest expanded through the Arabian Peninsula until it conquered Mecca and Medina the early 19th century. [69][105] (It was at this time, according to DeLong-Bas, that Wahhabis embraced the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya—which allow self-professed Muslim who do not follow Islamic law to be declared non-Muslims—to justify their warring and conquering the Muslim Sharifs of Hijaz.[104])

One of their most noteworthy and controversial attacks was on Karbala in 1802. There, according to a Wahhabi chronicler `Uthman b. `Abdullah b. Bishr: "The Muslims"—as the Wahhabis referred to themselves, not feeling the need to distinguish themselves from other Muslims, since they did not believe them to be Muslims --

scaled the walls, entered the city ... and killed the majority of its people in the markets and in their homes. [They] destroyed the dome placed over the grave of al-Husayn [and took] whatever they found inside the dome and its surroundings ... the grille surrounding the tomb which was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and other jewels ... different types of property, weapons, clothing, carpets, gold, silver, precious copies of the Qur'an."[106]

Wahhabis also massacred the male population and enslaved the women and children of the city of Ta'if in Hejaz in 1803.[107]

The Ottoman Empire eventually succeeded in counterattacking. In 1818 they defeated Al Saud, leveling the capital Diriyah, executing the Al-Saud emir, exiling the emirate's political and religious leadership,[97][108] and otherwise unsuccessfully attempted to stamp out not just the House of Saud but the Wahhabi mission.[109] A second, smaller Saudi state (Emirate of Nejd) lasted from 1819-1891. Its borders being within Najd, Wahhabism was protected from further Ottoman or Egyptian campaigns by the Najd's isolation, lack of valuable resources, and that era's limited communication and transportation.[110]

By the 1880s, at least among townsmen if not Bedouin, Wahhabi strict monotheistic doctrine had become the native religious culture of the Najd.[111]

In 1901, Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, a fifth generation descendent of Muhammad ibn Saud,[112] began a military campaign that led to the conquest of much of the Arabian peninsula and the founding of present day Saudi Arabia, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.[113] The result that safeguarded the vision of Islam-based around the tenets of Islam as preached by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was not bloodless, as 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations were carried out during its course, according to some estimates.[114][115][116][117]

Under the reign of Abdul-Aziz, "political considerations trumped religious idealism" favored by pious Wahhabis. His political and military success gave the Wahhabi ulama control over religious institutions with jurisdiction over considerable territory, and in later years Wahhabi ideas formed the basis of the rules and laws concerning social affairs, and shaped the kingdom's judicial and educational policies.[118] But protests from Wahhabi ulama were overridden when it came to consolidating power in Hijaz and al-Hasa, avoiding clashes with the great power of the region (Britain), adopting modern technology, establishing a simple governmental administrative framework, or signing an oil concession with the U.S. [119] The Wahhabi ulama also issued a fatwa affirming that "only the ruler could declare a jihad"[120] (a violation of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching according to DeLong-Bas.[50])

As the realm of Wahhabism expanded under Ibn Saud into areas of Shiite (Al-Hasa, conquered in 1913) and pluralistic Muslim tradition (Hejaz, conquered in 1924-5), Wahhabis pressed for forced conversion of Shia and an eradication of (what they saw as) idolatry. Ibn Saud sought "a more relaxed approach".[121]

In al-Hasa, efforts to stop the observance of Shia religious holidays and replace teaching and preaching duties of Shia clerics with Wahhabi, lasted only a year.[122]

In Mecca and Jeddah (in Hejaz) prohibition of tobacco, alcohol, playing cards and listening to music on the phonograph was looser than in Najd. Over the objections of Wahhabi ulama, Ibn Saud permitted both the driving of automobiles and the attendance of Shia at hajj.[123]

Enforcement of the commanding right and forbidding wrong, such as enforcing prayer observance and separation of the sexes, developed a prominent place during the second Saudi emirate, and in 1926 a formal committee for enforcement was founded in Mecca. [21][124][125]

While Wahhabi warriors swore loyalty to monarchs of Al Saud, there was one major rebellion. King Abdul-Aziz put down rebelling Ikhwan—nomadic tribesmen turned Wahhabi warriors who opposed his "introducing such innovations as telephones, automobiles, and the telegraph" and his "sending his son to a country of unbelievers (Egypt)". [126] Britain had aided Abdul-Aziz, and when the Ikhwan attacked the British protectorates of Transjordan, Iraq and Kuwait, as a continuation of jihad to expand the Wahhabist realm, Abdul-Aziz struck, killing hundreds before the rebels surrendered in 1929.[127]

Before Abdul-Aziz, during most of the second half of the 19th century, there was a strong aversion in Wahhabi lands to mixing with "idolaters" (which included most of the Muslim world). Voluntary contact was considered by Wahhabi clerics to be at least a sin, and if one enjoyed the company of idolaters, and "approved of their religion", an act of unbelief.[128] Travel outside the pale of Najd to the Ottoman lands "was tightly controlled, if not prohibited altogether".[129]

Over the course of its history, however, Wahhabism has become more accommodating towards the outside world.[130] In the late 1800s, Wahhabis found Muslims with at least similar beliefs—first with Ahl-i Hadith in India,[131] and later with Islamic revivalists in Arab states (one being Mahmud Sahiri al-Alusi in Baghdad).[132] The revivalists and Wahhabis shared a common interest in Ibn Taymiyya's thought, the permissibility of ijtihad, and the need to purify worship practices of innovation.[133] In the 1920s, Rashid Rida, a pioneer Salafist whose periodical al-Manar was widely read in the Muslim world, published an "anthology of Wahhabi treatises," and a work praising the Ibn Saud as "the savior of the Haramayn [the two holy cities] and a practitioner of authentic Islamic rule".[134][135]

In a bid "to join the Muslim mainstream and to erase the reputation of extreme sectarianism associated with the Ikhwan," in 1926 Ibn Saud convened a Muslim congress of representatives of Muslim governments and popular associations.[136] By the early 1950s, the "pressures" on Ibn Saud of controlling the regions of Hejaz and al-Hasa—"outside the Wahhabi heartland"—and of "navigating the currents of regional politics" "punctured the seal" between the Wahhabi heartland and the "land of idolatry" outside.[137][138]

A major current in regional politics at that time was secularnationalism, which, with Gamal Abdul Nasser, was sweeping the Arab world. To combat it, Wahhabi missionary outreach worked closely with Saudi foreign policy initiatives. In May 1962, a conference in Mecca organized by Saudis discussed ways to combat secularism and socialism. In its wake, the World Muslim League was established.[139] To propagate Islam and "repel inimical trends and dogmas", the League opened branch offices around the globe.[54] It developed closer association between Wahhabis and leading Salafis, and made common cause with the Islamic revivalist Muslim Brotherhood, Ahl al-Hadith and the Jamaat-i Islami, combating Sufism and "innovative" popular religious practices[139] and rejecting the West and Western "ways which were so deleterious of Muslim piety and values."[140] Missionaries were sent to West Africa, where the League funded schools, distributed religious literature, and gave scholarships to attend Saudi religious universities. One result was the Izala Society which fought Sufism in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon.[141]

An event that had a great effect on Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia[142] was the "infiltration of the transnationalist revival movement" in the form of thousands of pious, Islamist Arab Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Egypt following Nasser's clampdown on the brotherhood[143] (and also from similar nationalist clampdowns in Iraq[144] and Syria[145]), to help staff the new school system of (the largely illiterate) Kingdom.[146]

The Brotherhood's Islamist ideology differed from the more conservative Wahhabism which preached loyal obedience to the king. The Brotherhood dealt in what one author (Robert Lacey) called "change-promoting concepts" like social justice, and anticolonialism, and gave "a radical, but still apparently safe, religious twist" to the Wahhabi values Saudi students "had absorbed in childhood". With the Brotherhood's "hands-on, radical Islam", jihad became a "practical possibility today", not just part of history.[147]

The Brethren were ordered by the Saudi clergy and government not to attempt to proselytize or otherwise get involved in religious doctrinal matters within the Kingdom, but nonetheless "took control" of Saudi Arabia's intellectual life" by publishing books and participating in discussion circles and salons held by princes.[148] In time they took leading roles in key governmental ministries,[149] and had influence on education curriculum.[150] An Islamic university in Medina created in 1961 to train—mostly non-Saudi—proselytizers to Wahhabism, [151] became "a haven" for Muslim Brother refugees from Egypt.[152] The Brothers' ideas eventually spread throughout the kingdom and had great effect on Wahhabism—although observers differ as to whether this was by "undermining" it[142][153] or "blending" with it.[154][155]

In the 1950s and 60s within Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi ulama maintained their hold on religious law courts, presided over the creation of Islamic universities, and a public school system which gave students "a heavy dose of religious instruction".[156] Outside of Saudi the Wahhabi ulama became "less combative" toward the rest of the Muslim world. In confronting the challenge of the West, Wahhabi doctrine "served well" for many Muslims as a "platform" and "gained converts beyond the peninsula."[156][157]

A number of reasons have been given for this success. The growth in popularity and strength of both Arab nationalism (although Wahhabis opposed any form of nationalism as an ideology, Saudis were Arabs, and their enemy the Ottoman caliphate was ethnically Turkish),[28] and Islamic reform (specifically reform by following the example of those first three generations of Muslims known as the Salaf);[28] the destruction of the Ottoman Empire which sponsored their most effective critics;[158] the destruction of another rival, the Khilafa in Hejaz, in 1925.[28] Not least in importance was the money Saudi Arabia earned from exporting oil.[78]

The pumping and export of oil from Saudi Arabia started during World War II, and its earnings helped fund religious activities in the 1950s and 60. But it was the 1973 oil crisis and quadrupling in the price of oil that both increased the kingdom's wealth astronomically and enhanced its prestige by demonstrating its international power as a leader of OPEC. By 1980, Saudi Arabia was earning every three days the income from oil it had taken a year to earn before the embargo.[159] Tens of billions of dollars of this money were spent on books, media, schools, scholarships for students (from primary to post-graduate), fellowships and subsidies to reward journalists, academics and Islamic scholars, the building of hundreds of Islamic centers and universities, and over one thousand schools and one thousand mosques.[160][161][162] During this time, Wahhabism attained what Gilles Kepel called a "preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam."[78]

Between 1982 and 1992 an estimated 35,000 individual Muslim volunteers went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and their Afghan regime. Thousands more attended frontier schools teeming with former and future fighters. Somewhere between 12,000 and 25,000 of these volunteers came from Saudi Arabia.[168] Saudi Arabia and the other conservative Gulf monarchies also provided considerable financial support to the jihad -- $600 million a year by 1982.[169]

By 1989, Soviet troops had withdrawn and within a few years not only had the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul collapsed, so had the Soviet Union.

This Saudi/Wahhabi religious triumph further stood out in the Muslim world because many Muslim-majority states (and the PLO) were allied with the Soviet Union and did not support the Afghan jihad.[170] But many jihad volunteers (most famously Osama bin Laden) returning home to Saudi and elsewhere were often radicalized by Islamic militants who were "much more extreme than their Saudi sponsors."[170]

In 1979 400–500 Islamist insurgents, using smuggled weapons and supplies, took over the Grand mosque in Mecca, called for an overthrow of the monarchy, denounced the Wahhabi ulama as royal puppets, and announced the arrival of the Mahdi of "end time". The insurgents deviated from Wahhabi doctrine in significant details,[171] but were also associated with leading Wahhabi ulama (Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz knew the insurgent's leader, Juhayman al-Otaybi).[172] Their seizure of Islam's holiest site, the taking hostage of hundreds of hajj pilgrims, and the deaths of hundreds of militants, security forces and hostages caught in crossfire during the two-week-long retaking of the mosque, all shocked the Islamic world[173] and did not enhance the prestige of Al Saud as "custodians" of the mosque.

The incident also damaged the prestige of the Wahhabi establishment. Saudi leadership sought and received Wahhabi fatawa to approve the military removal of the insurgents and after that to execute them.[174] But Wahhabi clerics also fell under suspicion for involvement with the insurgents. [175] In part as a consequence, Sahwa clerics influenced by Brethren's ideas were given freer rein. Their ideology was also thought more likely to compete with the recent Islamic revolutionism/third-worldism of the Iranian Revolution.[175]

Although the insurgents were motivated by religious puritanism, the incident was not followed by a crackdown on other religious purists, but by giving greater power to the ulama and religious conservatives to more strictly enforce Islamic codes in myriad ways[176]—from the banning of women's images in the media to adding even more hours of Islamic studies in school and giving more power and money to the religious police to enforce conservative rules of behaviour.[177][178][179]

In August 1990 Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. Concerned that Saddam Hussein might push south and seize its own oil fields, Saudis requested military support from the US and allowed tens of thousands of US troops to be based in the Kingdom to fight Iraq.[149]

But what "amounted to seeking infidels' assistance against a Muslim power" was difficult to justify in terms of Wahhabi doctrine.[180][181]

Again Saudi authorities sought and received a fatwa from leading Wahhabi ulama supporting their action. The fatwa failed to persuade many conservative Muslims and ulama who strongly opposed US presence, including the Muslim Brotherhood-supported the Sahwah "Awakening" movement that began pushing for political change in the Kingdom.[182] Outside the kingdom, Islamist/Islamic revival groups that had long received aid from Saudi and had ties with Wahhabis (Arab jihadists, Pakistani and Afghan Islamists) supported Iraq, not Saudi.[27]

During this time and later, many in the Wahhabi/Salafi movement (such as Osama bin Laden) not only no longer looked to the Saudi monarch as an emir of Islam, but supported his overthrow, focusing on jihad (Salafist jihadists) against the US and (what they believe are) other enemies of Islam.[183][184] (This movement is sometimes called neo-Wahhabi or neo-salafi.[39][49])

The 2001 9/11 attacks on (Saudi's putative ally) the US that killed almost 3,000 people and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage[185] were assumed by many (at least outside the kingdom) to be "an expression of Wahhabism", since the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.[186] A backlash in the formerly hospitable US against the kingdom focused on its official religion that came to be considered by "some ... a doctrine of terrorism and hate."[83]

Inside the kingdom, Crown Prince Abdullah addressed the country's religious, tribal, business, and media leadership following the attacks in a series of televised gatherings calling for a strategy to correct what has gone wrong. According to author Robert Lacey, the gatherings and later articles and replies by a top cleric (Dr. Abdullah Turki) and two top Al Saud princes (Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz), served as an occasion to sort out who had the ultimate power in the kingdom—the Al Saud dynasty and not the ulema. It was declared that it has always been the role of executive rulers in Islamic history to exercise power and the job of the religious scholars to advise, never to govern.[147]

In 2003-2004, Saudi Arabia saw a wave of Al-Qaeda-related suicide bombings, attacks on Non-Muslim foreigners (about 80% of those employed in the Saudi private sector are foreign workers[187] and constitute about 30% of the country's population[188]) and gun battles between Saudi security forces and militants. One reaction to the attacks was a trimming back of the Wahhabi establishment's domination of religion and society. "National Dialogues" were held that "included Shiites, Sufis, liberal reformers, and professional women."[189] In 2009, as part of what some called an effort to "take on the ulema and reform the clerical establishment", King Abdullah issued a decree that only "officially approved" religious scholars would be allowed to issue fatwas in Saudi Arabia. The king also expanded the Council of Senior Scholars (containing officially approved religious scholars) to include scholars from Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence other than the Hanbalimadhab—Shafi'i, Hanafi and Maliki schools.[190]

Relations with the Muslim Brotherhood have deteriorated steadily. After 9/11, the then interior minister Prince Nayef, blamed the Brotherhood for extremism in the kingdom,[191] and he declared it guilty of "betrayal of pledges and ingratitude" and "the source of all problems in the Islamic world", after it was elected to power in Egypt.[192] In March 2014 the Saudi government declared the Brotherhood a "terrorist organization".[149]

Wahhabi influence in Saudi Arabia, however, remained tangible in the physical conformity in dress, in public deportment, and in public prayer. Most significantly, the Wahhabi legacy was manifest in the social ethos that presumed government responsibility for the collective moral ordering of society, from the behavior of individuals, to institutions, to businesses, to the government itself.[193]

As a religious revivalist movement that works to bring Muslims back from what it believes are foreign accretions that have corrupted Islam,[198] and believes that Islam is a complete way of life and so has prescriptions for all aspects of life, Wahhabism is quite strict in what it considers Islamic behavior.

This does not mean however, that all adherents agree on what is required or forbidden, or that rules have not varied by area or changed over time. In Saudi Arabia the strict religious atmosphere of Wahhabi doctrine is visible in the conformity in dress, public deportment, and public prayer,[193] and makes its presence felt by the wide freedom of action of the "religious police", clerics in mosques, teachers in schools, and judges (who are religious legal scholars) in Saudi courts.[199]

Wahhabism is noted for its policy of "compelling its own followers and other Muslims strictly to observe the religious duties of Islam, such as the five prayers", and for "enforcement of public morals to a degree not found elsewhere".[200]

While other Muslims might urge abstention from alcohol, modest dress, and salat prayer, for Wahhabis prayer "that is punctual, ritually correct, and communally performed not only is urged but publicly required of men." Not only is wine forbidden, but so are "all intoxicating drinks and other stimulants, including tobacco." Not only is modest dress prescribed, but the type of clothing that should be worn, especially by women (a black abaya, covering all but the eyes and hands) is specified.[69]

Following the preaching and practice of Abdul Wahhab that coercion should be used to enforce following of sharia, an official committee has been empowered to "Command the Good and Forbid the Evil" (the so-called "religious police")[184][200] in Saudi Arabia—the one country founded with the help of Wahhabi warriors and whose scholars and pious[citation needed] dominate many aspects of the Kingdom's life. Committee "field officers" enforce strict closing of shops at prayer time, segregation of the sexes, prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol, driving of motor vehicles by women, and other social restrictions.[201]

A large number of practices have been reported forbidden by Saudi Wahhabi officials, preachers or religious police. Practices that have been forbidden as Bida'a (innovation) or shirk and sometimes "punished by flogging" during Wahhabi history include performing or listening to music, dancing, fortune telling, amulets, television programs (unless religious), smoking, playing backgammon, chess, or cards, drawing human or animal figures, acting in a play or writing fiction (both are considered forms of lying), dissecting cadavers (even in criminal investigations and for the purposes of medical research), recorded music played over telephones on hold, the sending of flowers to friends or relatives who are in the hospital[116][202][203][204][205][206] Common Muslim practices Wahhabis believe are contrary to Islam include listening to music in praise of Muhammad, praying to God while visiting tombs (including the tomb of Muhammad), celebrating mawlid (birthday of the Prophet),[207] the use of ornamentation on or in mosques.[208] The driving of motor vehicles by women is allowed in every country but Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia [209] and the famously strict Taliban practiced dream interpretation is discouraged by Wahhabis.[210][211]

Wahhabism emphasizes "Thaqafah Islamiyyah" or Islamic culture and the importance of avoiding non-Islamic cultural practices and non-Muslim friendship no matter how innocent these may appear,[212][213] on the grounds that the Sunna forbids imitating non-Muslims.[214] Foreign practices sometimes punished and sometimes simply condemned by Wahhabi preachers as unIslamic, include celebrating foreign days (such as Valentine's Day[215] or Mothers Day.[212][214]) shaving, cutting or trimming of beards,[216] giving of flowers,[217] standing up in honor of someone, celebrating birthdays (including the Prophet's), keeping or petting dogs.[205] Wahhabi scholars have warned against taking non-Muslims as friends, smiling at or wishing them well on their holidays.[62]

Wahhabis are not in unanimous agreement on what is forbidden as sin. Some Wahhabi preachers or activists go further than the official Saudi Arabian Council of Senior Scholars in forbidding (what they believe to be) sin. Several wahhabis have declared Football (Soccer) forbidden for a variety of reasons (because it is a non-Muslim, foreign practice—because of the revealing uniforms, or because of the foreign non-Muslim language (foul, penalty kick) used in matches.[218][219]) The Saudi Grand Mufti, on the other hand has declared football permissible (halal). [220]

Senior Wahhabi leaders in Saudi Arabia have determined that Islam forbids the traveling or working outside the home by a woman without their husband's permission—permission which may be revoked at any time—on the grounds that the different physiological structures and biological functions of the different genders mean that each sex is assigned a different role to play in the family.[221] As mentioned before, Wahhabism also forbids the driving of motor vehicles by women. Sexual intercourse out of wedlock may be punished with beheading[222] although sex out of wedlock is permissible with a slave women (Prince Bandar bin Sultan was the product of "a brief encounter" between his father Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz" -- the Saudi defense minister for many years -- and "his slave, a black servingwoman")[147] or was before slavery was banned in Saudi Arabia in 1962.[223]

Despite this strictness, senior Wahhabi scholars of Islam in the Saudi kingdom have made exceptions in ruling on what is haram. Foreign non-Muslim troops are forbidden in Arabia except when the king needed them to confront Saddam Hussein in 1990; gender mixing of men and women is forbidden, and fraternization with non-Muslims is discouraged, but not at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Movie theaters and driving by women are forbidden except at the ARAMCO compound in eastern Saudi, populated by workers for the company that provides almost all the government's revenue. (The exceptions made at KAUST are also in effect at ARAMCO.)[224]

And more general rules of what is permissible have changed over time. Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud imposed Wahhabi doctrines and practices "in a progressively gentler form" as his early 20th-century conquests expanded his state into urban areas, especially the Hejab.[225] After vigorous debate Wahhabi religious authorities in Saudi Arabia allowed the use of paper money (in 1951), the abolition of slavery (in 1962), education of females (1964), and use of television (1965).[223] Music the sound of which once might have led to summary execution is now commonly heard on Saudi radios. [225] Minarets for mosques and use of funeral markers, which were once forbidden, are now allowed. Prayer attendance which was once enforced by flogging, is no longer. [226]

The uniformity of dress among men and women in Saudi Arabia (compared to other Muslim countries in the Middle East) has been called a "striking example of Wahhabism's outward influence on Saudi society", and an example of the Wahhabi belief that "outward appearances and expressions are directly connected to one's inward state."[208] The "long, white flowing thobe" worn by men of Saudi Arabia has been called the "Wahhabi national dress".[227] Red-and-white checkered or white head scarves known as Ghutrah are worn. In public women are required to wear a black abaya or other black clothing that covers every part of their body other than hands and eyes.

A "badge" of a particularly pious Salafi or Wahhabi man is a robe too short to cover the ankle, an untrimmed beard,[228] and no cord (Agal) to hold the head scarf in place.[229] The warriors of the Ikhwan Wahhabi religious militia wore a white turban in place of an agal.[230]

Wahhabi mission, or Dawah Wahhabiyya, is to spread purified Islam through the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim. [231] Tens of billions of dollars have been spent by the Saudi government and charities on mosques, schools, education materials, scholarships, throughout the world to promote Islam and the Wahhabi interpretation of it. Tens of thousands of volunteers[168] and several billion dollars also went in support of the jihad against the atheist communist regime governing Muslim Afghanistan.[169]

Wahhabism originated in the Najd region, and its conservative practices have stronger support there than in regions in the kingdom to the east or west of it.[232][233][234] Glasse credits the softening of some Wahhabi doctrines and practices on the conquest of the Hejaz region "with its more cosmopolitan traditions and the traffic of pilgrims which the new rulers could not afford to alienate".[225]

The only other country "whose native population is Wahhabi and that adheres to the Wahhabi creed", is the small gulf monarchy of Qatar,[235][236] whose version of Wahhabism is notably less strict.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, Qatar made significant changes in the 1990s. Women are now allowed to drive and travel independently; non-Muslims are permitted to consume alcohol and pork. The country sponsors a film festival, has a "world-class art museums", host the Al Jazeera and will hold the 2022 football World Cup, and has no religious force that polices public morality. Qatari's attribute its different interpretation of Islam to the absence of an indigenous clerical class and autonomous bureaucracy (religious affairs authority, endowments, Grand Mufti), the fact that Qatari rulers do not derive their legitimacy from such a class.[236][237]

Adherents to the Wahhabi movement are self-described Sunni Muslims (although some dispute whether they actually are).[238][239] The primary Wahhabi doctrine is the uniqueness and unity of God (Tawhid),[19][240] and opposition to shirk (polytheism), "the one unforgivable sin" (according to Wahhabism).[241]

They call for a return to the Islamic practices of the first generations of Muslims and an adherence to original texts, believing that Islamic practice has since drifted away from its roots through various interpretations. They generally take a literalist approach to Islamic religious writings and are often called fundamentalists. They also oppose doctrines held by other sects – particularly Sufis, Shiites and non-Wahhabi Sunni Islam. They place a strong emphasis on absolute monotheism and reject practices such as worshiping Allah at the graves of Muslim prophets and leaders. They also reject debate on and new interpretations of Islamic theology and practice.[238]

According to Wahhabis, they aspire to "assimilate with the beliefs of the early Sunni Muslims", specifically the first three generations known as the Salaf. According to Wahhabi creed or Aqeedah, the Quran and Hadith are the only fundamental and authoritative texts taken with the understanding of the Salaf. The exegesis of the Quran and statements of the early Muslims were later codified by a number of scholars, the most well known being the 13th-century Syrian scholar Ibn Taymiyyah.[19] Commentaries and "the examples of the early Muslim community (Ummah) and the four Rightly GuidedCaliphs (AD 632–661)" are used to support these texts (but are not considered independently authoritative).

Wahhabis reject Islamic "theology" (kalam) in favor of strict textualism in interpreting the Quran, and are sometimes described as being in the Athari school.[242] Because of the importance placed on the Salaf generation—which include the four Rightly Guided Caliphs (Rashidun)—Ibn Abd al-Wahhab strongly opposed the basic Shia tenant of the denial of the legitimacy of the first three caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman ibn Affan) and the designation of Ali ibn Abī Ṭālib as "the most preferred of the companions".[243]

One scholar (David Commins) describes the "pivotal idea" in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching as being that "Muslims who disagreed with his definition of monotheism were not ... misguided Muslims, but outside the pale of Islam altogether." This put Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching at odds with that of most Muslims through history who believed that the "shahada" profession of faith ("There is no god but God, Muhammad is his messenger") made one a Muslim, and that shortcomings in that person's behavior and performance of other obligatory rituals rendered them "a sinner", but "not an unbeliever."

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not accept that view. He argued that the criterion for one's standing as either a Muslim or an unbeliever was correct worship as an expression of belief in one God. ... any act or statement that indicates devotion to a being other than God is to associate another creature with God's power, and that is tantamount to idolatry (shirk). Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab included in the category of such acts popular religious practices that made holy men into intercessors with God. That was the core of the controversy between him and his adversaries, including his own brother.[244]

In Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's major work, a small book called Kitab al-Tawhid, he states that worship in Islam is limited to conventional acts of worship such as the five daily prayers (salat); fasting for Ramadan (Sawm); Dua (supplication); Istia'dha (seeking protection or refuge); Ist'ana (seeking help), and Istigatha to Allah (seeking benefits and calling upon Allah alone). Worship beyond this—making du'a or calling upon anyone or anything other than God, or seeking supernatural help and protection from something other than Allah—are acts of shirk and in violation of the tenets of Tawhid (montheism).[245][page needed][246]

Ibn Abd al-Wahahb's justification for considering the self-proclaimed Muslims of Arabia to be unbelievers, and for waging war on them, can be summed up as his belief that the original pagans the prophet Muhammad fought "affirmed that God is the creator, the sustainer and the master of all affairs; they gave alms, they performed pilgrimage and they avoided forbidden things from fear of God". What made them pagans whose blood could be shed and wealth plundered was that "they sacrificed animals to other beings; they sought the help of other beings; they swore vows by other beings." Someone who does such things even if their lives are otherwise exemplary is not a Muslim but an unbeliever (as Ibn Abd al-Wahahb believed). Once such people have received the call to "true Islam", understood it and then rejected it, their blood and treasure are forfeit.[247][248]

This disagreement between Wahhabis and non-Wahhabi Muslims over the definition of worship and monotheism has remained much the same since 1740, according to David Commins,[244] although, according to Saudi writer and religious television show host Abdul Aziz Qassim, as of 2014, "there are changes happening within the [Wahhabi] doctrine and among its followers."[15]

Other differences between orthodox Sunni Islam and Wahhabism (according to one critic—Ahmed Moussalli) include:

which attributes to God attributes such as a direction and position, which are human characteristics, and

the claim that created things existed eternally with Allah (examples being the claim that Allah literally sits on the throne (al-kursi) and has left space for Prophet Muhammad to sit next to Him, or that Allah descends physically);

opposition to the scholarly consensus on the divorce issue;

opposition to the orthodox Sunni practice of tawassul (i.e. to the practice of asking Allah for things using a deceased pious saint as an intermediary);

the claim that Allah has a limit (hadd) that only He knows;

Ibn Abd al-Wahahb's classifying of oneness in worship of Allah (tawhid) into two parts: tawhid al-rububiyya and tawhid al-uluhiyya, something never done by pious adherents or al-salaf.[49]

Whether the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab included the need for social renewal and "plans for socio-religious reform of society" in the Arabian Peninsula, rather than simply a return to "ritual correctness and moral purity", is disputed.[250][251]

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's writings emphasized the Quran and Sunna. He used ijma only "in conjunction with its corroboration of the Quran and hadith"[252] (and giving preference to the ijma of Muhammad's companions rather than the ijma of legal specialists after his time), and qiyas only in cases of extreme necessity.[253] He rejected the imitation of past scholarship (taqlid) in favor of independent reasoning (ijtihad), opposed using local customs.[254] He urged his followers to "return to the primary sources" of Islam in order "to determine how the Quran and Muhammad dealt with specific situations",[255] when using ijtihad ("independent reasoning"). According to Edward Mortimer, it was at the scholarly level in the face of a clear evidence or proof from a hadeeth or Qur'anic text, that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab condemned taqlid.[256] (According to one scholar—Natana DeLong-Bas—Wahhabi focus on failure to abide by Islamic law as grounds for declaring a Muslim an apostate is not based on the Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's preaching but an adaption of the ideology of Ibn Taymiyya, that came after the death of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.[257])

According to an expert on law in Saudi Arabia (Frank Vogel), Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself "produced no unprecedented opinions". The "Wahhabis' bitter differences with other Muslims were not over fiqh rules at all, but over aqida, or theological positions", and in fiqh.[258] Scholar David Cummings also states that early disputes with other Muslims did not center on fiqh, (Wahhabis association with the Hanbali school notwithstanding), and that the belief that Wahhabism was borne of Hanbali thought is a "myth".[259]

Some scholars are ambivalent as to whether Wahhabis belong to the Hanbali legal tradition (i.e. school of fiqh, or Madhhab). Just as the Salaf followed no school of fiqh (as they had not been developed), so Wahhabis—as imitators of the Salaf—are outside of any school.[260] The Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World maintains Wahhabis "rejected all jurisprudence that in their opinion did not adhere strictly to the letter of the Qur'an and the hadith".[46] Cyril Glasse's New Encyclopedia of Islam states that "strictly speaking", Wahhabis "do not see themselves as belonging to any school,"[260] and that in doing so they correspond to the ideal aimed at by Ibn Hanbal, and thus they can be said to be of his 'school'.[261][262] According to DeLong-Bas, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab never directly claimed to be a Hanbali jurist, warned his followers about the dangers of adhering unquestionably to fiqh, and did not consider "the opinion of any law school to be binding."[263] He did, however, follow the Hanbali methodology of extreme conservatism in interpretation of the Sharia.[263]

At least one Wahhabis source also states that at least in some circumstance bin Abd al-Wahhaab did "not prohibit following a madhhab [school of fiqh such as Hanbali] so long as there is no clash with a clear, plain legislative text". It quotes correspondence by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in support[264] arguing that abandoning Madhhab precedent is simply a revival of the practice of early students of the scholars of the Madh'hab (fiqh schools) who would leave their teacher's position in light of a newly found evidence.[265][266]

According to various sources—scholars,[33][49][54][267][268][269] former Saudi students, [270] Arabic-speaking/reading teachers who have had access to Saudi text books, [271] and journalists[272] —Ibn `Abd al Wahhab and his successors preach that theirs is the one true form of Islam. According to a doctrine known as al-wala` wa al-bara` (literally, "loyalty and disassociation"), Abd al-Wahhab argued that it was "imperative for Muslims not to befriend, ally themselves with, or imitate non-Muslims or heretical Muslims", and that this "enmity and hostility of Muslims toward non-Muslims and heretical had to be visible and unequivocal".[273][274][275] Even as late as 2003, entire pages in Saudi textbooks were devoted to explaining to undergraduates that all forms of Islam except Wahhabism were deviation,[271] although, according to one source (Hamid Algar) Wahhabis have "discreetly concealed" this view from other Muslims outside Saudi Arabia "over the years".[276][277]

In reply, the Saudi Arabian government "has strenuously denied the above allegations", including that "their government exports religious or cultural extremism or supports extremist religious education."[278]

According to ibn Abdal-Wahhab there are three objectives for Islamic government and society: "to believe in Allah, enjoin good behavior, and forbid wrongdoing." This doctrine has been sustained in missionary literature, sermons, fatwa rulings, and explications of religious doctrine by Wahhabis since the death of ibn Abdal-Wahhab.[69] Ibn Abd al-Wahhab saw a role for the imam, "responsible for religious matters", and the amir, "in charge of political and military issues".[279] (In Saudi history the imam has not been a religious preacher or scholar, but Muhammad ibn Saud[280] and subsequent Saudi rulers.[55][281]).

He also taught that the Muslim ruler is owed unquestioned allegiance as a religious obligation from his people so long as he leads the community according to the laws of God. A Muslim must present a bayah, or oath of allegiance, to a Muslim ruler during his lifetime to ensure his redemption after death.[69][282] Any counsel given to a ruler from community leaders or ulama should be private, not through public acts such as petitions, demonstrations, etc. [283][284] (This strict obedience can become problematic if a dynastic dispute arises and someone rebelling against the ruler succeeds and becomes the ruler, as happened in the late 19th century at the end of the second al-Saud state.[285] Is the successful rebel a ruler to be obeyed, or a usurper?[286])

While this gives the king wide power, respecting shari'a does impose limits, such as giving qadi (Islamic judges) independence. This means not interfering in their deliberations, but also not codifying laws, following precedents or establishing a uniform system of law courts—both of which violate the qadi's independence.[287]

Wahhabis have traditionally given their allegiance to the House of Saud, but a movement of "Salafi jihadis" has developed among those who believe Al Saud has abandoned the laws of God.[183][184] According to Zubair Qamar, while the "standard view" is that "Wahhabis are apolitical and do not oppose the State", there is/was another "strain" of Wahhabism that "found prominence among a group of Wahhabis after the fall of the second Saudi State in the 1800s", and post 9/11 is associated with Jordanian/Palestinian scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and "Wahhabi scholars of the 'Shu’aybi' school".[288]

Wahhabis share the belief of Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Islamic dominion over politics and government and the importance of dawah (proselytizing or preaching of Islam) not just towards non-Muslims but towards erroring Muslims. However Wahhabi preachers are conservative and do not deal with concepts such as social justice, anticolonialism, or economic equality, expounded upon by Islamist Muslims.[289] Ibn Abdul Wahhab's original pact promised whoever championed his message, 'will, by means of it, rule and lands and men.'"[20]

Because Wahhabis believe that opinions expressed by Muslims (other than those of the first three generations of Muslims) on what is Islamic are not worthy of consideration they do not follow the "consensus" (or ijma`) of non-Salafi Islamic scholars that came after those generations as a basis of shariah.[290]

Ibn Abdal-Wahhab opposed Taqlid, what he perceived to be blind deference to religious authority, believing that it obstructs direct connection with the Qur'an and Sunnah. This led him to deprecate the importance and full authority of Islamic scholars and muftis of the age. In his arguments, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab would use translations and interpretation of the verses of the Qur'an (ayat) that were contrary to the consensus amongst the scholars of the age, and positions against which there had been consensus for centuries. This methodology was argued to be erroneous by a number of scholars.[291][292][293]

However the Wahhabi movement saw itself as championing the re-opening of ijtihad, being an intellectual pursuit of scholarly work clarifying opinions in the face of new evidence being a newly proven "sound" or sahihhadeeth, a discovered historical early ijma (scholarly consensus from the early Muslims) or a suitable analogy, qiyas, based on historical records.[294]

And it is that we accept the aayaat [verses of the Quran] and ahaadeeth [recorded doings and sayings of the prophet] of the Attributes [of God] upon their apparent meanings, and we leave their true meanings, while believing in their realities, to Allaah ta'aalaa [God most high]. For Maalik, one of the greatest of the "ulamaa" of the Salaf, when asked about al-istiwaa` [rising] in His Saying (ta'aalaa): "Ar-Rahmaan [one of the names of God] rose over the Throne." [Verse Taa-Haa: 5] said: "Al-istiwaa' is known, the 'how' of it is unknown, believing in it is waajib [an obligation for Muslims], and asking about it is bid‘ah [a forbidden innovation]."[266][297]

One of the more detailed estimates of religious population in the Persian Gulf is by Mehrdad Izady who estimates, "using cultural and not confessional criteria", only 4.56 million Wahhabis in the Persian Gulf region, about 4 million from Saudi Arabia, (mostly the Najd), and the rest coming overwhelmingly from the Emirates and Qatar.[24] Most Sunni Qataris are Wahhabis (46.87% of all Qataris)[24] and 44.8% of Emiratis are Wahhabis,[24] 5.7% of Bahrainis are Wahhabis, and 2.17% of Kuwaitis are Wahhabis.[24]

There has traditionally been a recognized head of the Wahhabi "religious estate", often a member of Al ash-Sheikh (a decedent of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) or related to another religious head. For example, Abd al-Latif was the son of Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan.

Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1752-1826) was the head of Wahhabism after his father retired from public life in 1773. After the fall of the first Saudi emirate, Abd Allah went into exile in Cairo where he died.[298]

Sulayman ibn Abd Allah (1780-1818) was a grandson of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and author of an influential treatise that restricted travel to and residing in land of idolaters (i.e. land outside of the Wahhabi area).[299]

Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al ash-Sheikh (1893-1969) was the head of Wahhabism in mid twentieth century. He has been said to have "dominated the Wahhabi religious estate and enjoyed unrivaled religious authority."[300]

In more recent times, a couple of Wahhabi clerics have risen to prominence that have no relation to ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, has been called "the most prominent proponent" of Wahhabism during his time. He died in 1999.[301]

Muhammad ibn al-Uthaymeen, another "giant" died in 2001. According to David Dean Commins, no one "has emerged" with the same "degree of authority in the Saudi religious establishment" since their deaths.[301]

Control of Mecca and Medina, which gave Wahhabis great influence on Muslim culture and thinking;

Oil, which after 1975 allowed Wahhabis to promote their interpretations of Islam using billions from oil export revenue.[302]

Scholar Gilles Kepel, agrees that the tripling in the price of oil in the mid-1970s and the progressive takeover of Saudi Aramco in the 1974–1980 period, provided the source of much influence of Wahhabism in the Islamic World.

... the financial clout of Saudi Arabia had been amply demonstrated during the oil embargo against the United States, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. This show of international power, along with the nation's astronomical increase in wealth, allowed Saudi Arabia's puritanical, conservative Wahhabite faction to attain a preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam. Saudi Arabia's impact on Muslims throughout the world was less visible than that of Khomeini's Iran, but the effect was deeper and more enduring. .... it reorganized the religious landscape by promoting those associations and ulemas who followed its lead, and then, by injecting substantial amounts of money into Islamic interests of all sorts, it won over many more converts. Above all, the Saudis raised a new standard -- the virtuous Islamic civilization -- as foil for the corrupting influence of the West.[78]

Estimates of Saudi spending on religious causes abroad include "upward of $100 billion";[303] between $2 and 3 billion per year since 1975 (compared to the annual Soviet propaganda budget of $1 billion/year);[304] and "at least $87 billion" from 1987-2007.[305]

Its largesse funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith", throughout the Muslim World, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian.[306] It extended to young and old, from children's madrasas to high-level scholarship.[307] "Books, scholarships, fellowships, mosques" (for example, "more than 1,500 mosques were built from Saudi public funds over the last 50 years") were paid for.[308] It rewarded journalists and academics, who followed it and built satellite campuses around Egypt for Al Azhar, the oldest and most influential Islamic university.[161] Yahya Birt counts spending on "1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres and dozens of Muslim academies and schools".[304][309]

This financial aid has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew,[306] and has caused the Saudi interpretation (sometimes called "petro-Islam"[310]) to be perceived as the correct interpretation—or the "gold standard" of Islam—in many Muslims' minds.[311][312]

According to counter-terrorism scholar Thomas F. Lynch III, Sunni extremists perpetrated about 700 terror attacks killing roughly 7,000 people from 1981-2006.[313] What connection, if any, there is between Wahhabism and the Jihadi Salafis such as Al-Qaeda who carried out these attacks, is disputed.

The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden did not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab and was not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia, yet for the media it came to define Wahhabi Islam during the later years of bin Laden's lifetime. However "unrepresentative" bin Laden's global jihad was of Islam in general and Wahhabi Islam in particular, its prominence in headline news took Wahhabi Islam across the spectrum from revival and reform to global jihad.[314]

Noah Feldman distinguishes between what he calls the "deeply conservative" Wahhabis and what he calls the "followers of political Islam in the 1980s and 1990s," such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad and later Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. While Saudi Wahhabis were "the largest funders of local Muslim Brotherhood chapters and other hard-line Islamists" during this time, they opposed jihadi resistance to Muslim governments and assassination of Muslim leaders because of their belief that "the decision to wage jihad lay with the ruler, not the individual believer".[315]

More recently the self-declared "Islamic State" in Iraq and Syria headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been described as both more violent than al-Qaeda and more closely aligned with Wahhabism.

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group's territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.[317]

According to scholar Bernard Haykel, "for Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself." Wahhabism is the Islamic State's "closest religious cognate."[317]

Among the criticism, or comments made by critics, of the Wahhabi movement are

that it is not so much strict and uncompromising as aberrant,[318] going beyond the bounds of Islam in its restricted definition of tawhid (monotheism), and much too willing to takfir (declare non-Muslim and subject to execution) Muslims it found in violation of Islam[319] (in the second Wahhabi-Saudi jihad/conquest of the Arabian peninsula, an estimated 400,000 were killed or wounded according to some estimates[114][115][116][117]);

that bin Saud's agreement to wage jihad to spread Ibn Abdul Wahhab's teachings had more to do with traditional Najd practice of raiding -- "instinctive fight for survival and appetite for lucre"—than with religion;[320]

that unlike other revivalists, its founder Abd ul-Wahhab showed little scholarship—writing little and making even less commentary;[54]

that its contention that ziyara (visiting tombs of Muhammad, his family members, descendants, companions, or Sufi saints) and tawassul (intercession), violate tauhid al-'ibada (directing all worship to God alone) has no basis in tradition, in consensus or in hadith, and that even if it did, it would not be grounds for excluding practitioners of ziyara and tawassul from Islam;[319]

that historically Wahhabis have had a suspicious willingness to ally itself with non-Muslim powers (specifically America and Britain), and in particular to ignore the encroachments into Muslim territory of a non-Muslim imperial power (the British) while waging jihad and weakening the Muslim Caliphate of the Ottomans;[321][322] and

that Wahhabi strictness in matters of hijab and separation of the sexes, has led not to a more pious and virtuous Saudi Arabia, but to a society showing a very un-Islamic lack of respect towards women.

The first people to oppose Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab were his father Abd al-Wahhab and his brother Salman Ibn Abd al-Wahhab who was an Islamic scholar and qadi. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's brother wrote a book in refutation of his brothers' new teachings, called: "The Final Word from the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sayings of the Scholars Concerning the School of Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab", also known as: "Al-Sawa`iq al-Ilahiyya fi Madhhab al-Wahhabiyya" ("The Divine Thunderbolts Concerning the Wahhabi School").[323]

In "The Refutation of Wahhabism in Arabic Sources, 1745–1932",[323] Hamadi Redissi provides original references to the description of Wahhabis as a divisive sect (firqa) and outliers (Kharijites) in communications between Ottomans and Egyptian Khedive Muhammad Ali. Redissi details refutations of Wahhabis by scholars (muftis); among them Ahmed Barakat Tandatawin, who in 1743 describes Wahhabism as ignorance (Jahala).

In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi Wahhabis under Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and captured the holy Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq and destroyed the tombs of Husayn ibn Ali who is the grandson of Muhammad, and Ali (Ali bin Abu Talib), the son-in-law of Muhammad (see: Saudi sponsorship mentioned previously). In 1803 and 1804 the Saudis captured Mecca and Madinah and demolished various tombs of Ahl al-Bayt and Sahabah, ancient monuments, ruins according to Wahhabis, they "removed a number of what was seen as sources or possible gateways to polytheism or shirk" - such as the tomb of Fatimah, the daughter of Muhammad. In 1998 the Saudis bulldozed and poured gasoline over the grave of Aminah bint Wahb, the mother of Muhammad, causing resentment throughout the Muslim World.[324][325][326]

Shi'a Muslims complain that Wahhabis and their teachings are a driving force behind sectarian violence and anti-Shia targeted killings in many countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Yemen. Worldwide Saudi run, sponsored mosques and Islamic schools teach Wahhabi version of the Sunni Islam that labels Shia Muslims, Sufis, Christians, Jews and others as either apostates or infidels, thus paving a way for armed jihad against them by any means necessary till their death or submission to the Wahhabi doctrine. Wahhabis consider Shi'ites to be the archenemies of Islam.[327]

Wahhabism is a major factor behind the rise of such groups as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram, while also inspiring movements such as the Taliban.[328][329]

One early rebuttal of Wahhabism, (by Sunni jurist Ibn Jirjis) argued that "Whoever declares that there is no god but God and prays toward Mecca is a believer", supplicating the dead is permitted because it is not a form of worship but merely calling out to them, and that worship at graves is not idolatry unless the supplicant believes that buried saints have the power to determine the course of events. (These arguments were specifically rejected as heretical by the Wahhabi leader at the time.) [330]

According to at least one critic, the 1744-1745 alliance between Ibn Abdul Wahhab and the tribal chief Muhammad bin Saud to wage jihad on neighboring allegedly false-Muslims, was a "consecration" by Ibn Abdul Wahhab of bin Saud tribe's long standing raids on neighboring oases by "renaming those raids jihad." Part of the Najd's "Hobbesian state of perpetual war pitted Beouin bribes against one another for control of the scarce resources that could stave off starvation." And a case of substituting fath, "the 'opening' or conquest of a vast territory through religious zeal", for the "instinctive fight for survival and appetite for lucre." [320]

A study conducted by the NGOFreedom House found Wahhabi publications in mosques in the United States. These publications included statements that Muslims should not only "always oppose" infidels "in every way", but "hate them for their religion … for Allah's sake", that democracy "is responsible for all the horrible wars... the number of wars it started in the 20th century alone is more than 130 wars," and that Shia and certain Sunni Muslims were infidels.[335][336] In a response to the report, the Saudi government stated, "[It has] worked diligently during the last five years to overhaul its education system" but "[o]verhauling an educational system is a massive undertaking."[337]

A review of the study by Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) complained the study cited documents from only a few mosques, arguing most mosques in the U.S. are not under Wahhabi influence.[338] ISPU comments on the study were not entirely negative however, and concluded:

American-Muslim leaders must thoroughly scrutinize this study. Despite its limitations, the study highlights an ugly undercurrent in modern Islamic discourse that American-Muslims must openly confront. However, in the vigor to expose strains of extremism, we must not forget that open discussion is the best tool to debunk the extremist literature rather than a suppression of First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.[338]

The Wahhabi teachings disapprove of "veneration of the historical sites associated with early Islam", on the grounds that "only God should be worshiped" and "that veneration of sites associated with mortals leads to idolatry".[339] However, critics point out that no Muslims venerate buildings or tombs as it is a shirk. Muslims visiting the resting places of Ahl al-Bayt or Sahabah still pray to Allah alone while remembering the Prophet's companions and family members. Many buildings associated with early Islam, including mazaar, mausoleums and other artifacts have been destroyed in Saudi Arabia by Wahhabis from the early 19th century through the present day.[35][36] This practice has proved controversial and has received considerable criticism from Sufi and Shia Muslims and in the non-Muslim World.

^During the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, The journal Al-Jihad, run by Arab Muslim Brother Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, denounced the `Wahhabi` qualifier applied to Arabs who supported the Afghan resistance, seeing it as a plot by `the Western press, Radio Kaboul, the Sufi Marabouts, the Voice of America and Radio Free Iran.`[67]

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. ix. A neutral observer could define the Wahhabi mission as the religious reform movement associated with the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). He and his followers believe that they had a religious obligation to spread the call (in Arabic, da'wa) for a restoration of pure monotheistic worship.

^ abcd"Analysis Wahhabism". PBS Frontline. Retrieved 13 May 2014. For more than two centuries, Wahhabism has been Saudi Arabia's dominant creed. It is an austere form of Sunni Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabis believe that all those who don't practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies.[clarification needed]

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. ix. Thus, the mission's devotees contend that 'Wahhabism' is a misnomer for their efforts to revive correct Islamic belief and practice. Instead of the Wahhabi label, they prefer either Salafi, one who follows the ways of the first Muslim ancestors (salaf), or muwahhid, one who professes God's unity.

^ abcLacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. pp. 10–11. the two ... concluded a pact. Ibn Saud would protect and propagate the stern doctrines of the Wahhabi mission, which made the Koran the basis of government. In return, Abdul Wahhab would support the ruler, supplying him with 'glory and power.' Whoever championed his message, he promised, 'will, by means of it, rule and lands and men.'

^Glasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. p. 469. A sect dominant in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, at the beginning of the 19th century it gained footholds in India, Africa, and elsewhere.

^ abKepel, Gilles (2002). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. I.B.Tauris. p. 61. ISBN9781845112578. .... the financial clout of Saudi Arabia [that] had been amply demonstrated during the oil embargo against the United States, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. This show of international power, along with the nation's astronomical increase in wealth, allowed Saudi Arabia's puritanical, conservative Wahhabite faction to attain a preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam.

^"Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States"(PDF). June 26, 2003. Journalists and experts, as well as spokespeople of the world, have said that Wahhabism is the source of the overwhelming majority of terrorist atrocities in today's world, from Morocco to Indonesia, via Israel, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya. [JON KYL, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF OHIO]

^ abCommins, David (2006). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia(PDF). I.B.Tauris. p. vi. [T]he pivotal idea in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teaching determines whether one is a Muslim or an infidel. In his opinion, Muslims who disagreed with his definition of monotheism were not heretics, that is to say, misguided Muslims, but outside the pale of Islam altogether

^ abcGlasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. p. 470. Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab branded all who disagreed with him as heretics and apostates, thereby justifying the use of force in imposing his doctrine, and political suzerainty with it, on neighboring tribes. It allowed him to declare holy war (jihad), otherwise legally impossible, against other Muslims. To this end, Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab also taught the use of firearms in place of the sword and the lance, the traditional weapons of the desert.

^Finn, Helena Kane (October 8, 2002). "Cultural Terrorism and Wahhabi Islam". Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved 5 August 2014. It is the undisputed case that the Taliban justification for this travesty [the destruction of the buddha statues at Bamiyan] can be traced to the Wahhabi indoctrination program prevalent in the Afghan refugee camps and Saudi-funded Islamic schools (madrasas) in Pakistan that produced the Taliban. ...In Saudi Arabia itself, the destruction has focused on the architectural heritage of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, where Wahhabi religious foundations, with state support, have systematically demolished centuries-old mosques and mausolea, as well as hundreds of traditional Hijazi mansions and palaces.

^ abcDillon, Michael R. "WAHHABISM: IS IT A FACTOR IN THE SPREAD OF GLOBAL TERRORISM?"(PDF). September 2009. Naval Post-Graduate School. pp. 3–4. Retrieved 2 April 2014. Hamid Algar ... emphasizes the strong influence of the Saudi petrodollar in the propagation of Wahhabism, but also attributes the political situation of the Arab world at the time as a contributing factor that led to the co-opting of Salafism. ...Khaled Abou El Fadl, ... expresses the opinion that Wahhabism would not have been able to spread in the modern Muslim world ... it would have to be spread under the banner of Salafism.8 This attachment of Wahhabism to Salafism was needed as Salafism was a much more 'credible paradigm in Islam'; making it an ideal medium for Wahhabism. ... The co-opting of Salafism by Wahhabism was not completed until the 1970s when the Wahhabis stripped away some of their extreme intolerance and co-opted the symbolism and language of Salafism; making them practically indistinguishable.

^In the US the term "Wahhabi" was used in the 1950s to refer to "puritan Muslims", according to Life magazine. "The King of Arabia". Life. 31 May 1943. p. 72. ISSN00243019. Retrieved 22 June 2013.

^Bederka, Alan. "Wahhabism and Boko Haram"(PDF). Student Center for African Research and Resolutions. Retrieved 4 August 2014. Calling them Wahhabis implies that they learned ideas from a man – Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab – instead of the Qur'an and Sunnah the, two great sources of Islam.

^ abAbou El Fadl, Khaled (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. p. 57. ...the Wahhabis used to label themselves al-Muslimun (the Muslims) or al-Muwahidun (the monotheists), intimating that those who did not accept their creed were neither Muslims nor monotheists

^ abcdefgAlgar, Hamid (2002). Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International. pp. 1–2. Wahhabis themselves prefer the titles al-Muwahhidun or Ahl al-Tauhid, 'the asserters of the divine unity.' But precisely this self-awarded title springs from a desire to lay exclusive claim to the principle of tawhid that is a foundation of Islam itself; it implies a dismissal of all other Muslims as tainted by shirk. There is no reason to acquiesce in this assumption of a monopoly, and because the movement in question was ultimately the work of one man, Muhammad b. abdal-Wahhab it is reasonable as well as conventional to speak of 'Wahhabism' and Wahhabis.

^Mark Durie (June 6, 2013). "Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood: What is the difference?". Middle East Forum. Salafis themselves do not like being called Wahhabis, because to them it smacks of idolatry to name their movement after a recent leader. Instead they prefer to call themselves Ahl al-Sunnah "People of the Sunna".

^Abou el Fadl, Khalid (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. p. 57. ...the Wahhabis used to label themselves al-Muslimun (the Muslims) or al-Muwahidun (the monotheists), intimating that those who did not accept their creed were neither Muslims nor monotheists.

^Glasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. p. 469. Adherents ... prefer to call themselves Muhwahhidun (Unitarians). However, this name is not often used, as [it] is associated with other completely different sects extant and defunct.

^ abMacFarquhar, Neil (July 12, 2002). "A Few Saudis Defy a Rigid Islam to Debate Their Own Intolerance". New York Times. Retrieved 4 May 2014. Wahhabi-inspired xenophobia dominates religious discussion in a way not found elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Bookshops in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, for example, sell a 1,265-page souvenir tome that is a kind of "greatest hits" of fatwas on modern life. It is strewn with rulings on shunning non-Muslims: don't smile at them, don't wish them well on their holidays, don't address them as "friend."
A fatwa from Sheik Muhammad bin Othaimeen, whose funeral last year attracted hundreds of thousands of mourners, tackles whether good Muslims can live in infidel lands. The faithful who must live abroad should "harbor enmity and hatred for the infidels and refrain from taking them as friends," it reads in part.

^ abcde"Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi Theology". December 1992. Library of Congress Country Studies. Retrieved 17 March 2014. Muhammad ibn Saud turned his capital, Ad Diriyah, into a center for the study of religion under the guidance of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and sent missionaries to teach the reformed religion throughout the peninsula, the gulf, and into Syria and Mesopotamia. Together they began a jihad against the backsliding Muslims of the peninsula. Under the banner of religion and preaching the unity of God and obedience to the just Muslim ruler, the Al Saud by 1803 had expanded their dominion across the peninsula from Mecca to Bahrain, installing teachers, schools, and the apparatus of state power. So successful was the alliance between the Al ash Shaykh and the Al Saud that even after the Ottoman sultan had crushed Wahhabi political authority and had destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Ad Diriyah in 1818, the reformed religion remained firmly planted in the settled districts of southern Najd and of Jabal Shammar in the north. It would become the unifying ideology in the peninsula when the Al Saud rose to power again in the next century.

^Murphy, Caryle (September 5, 2006). "For Conservative Muslims, Goal of Isolation a Challenge". Washington Post. The kind of Islam practiced at Dar-us-Salaam, known as Salafism, once had a significant foothold among area Muslims, in large part because of an aggressive missionary effort by the government of Saudi Arabia. Salafism and its strict Saudi version, known as Wahhabism, struck a chord with many Muslim immigrants who took a dim view of the United States' sexually saturated pop culture and who were ambivalent about participating in a secular political system.

^Mark Durie (June 6, 2013). "Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood: What is the difference?". Middle East Forum. What is called Wahhabism — the official religious ideology of the Saudi state — is a form of Salafism. Strictly speaking, 'Wahhabism' is not a movement, but a label used mainly by non-Muslims to refer to Saudi Salafism, referencing the name of an influential 18th-century Salafi teacher, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. ... The continuing impact of Salafi dogma in Saudi Arabia means that Saudi leaders are active and diligent in funding and promoting Salafism all around the world. If there is a mosque receiving Saudi funding in your city today, in every likelihood it is a Salafi mosque. Saudi money has also leveraged Salafi teachings through TV stations, websites and publications.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 208. Much of Wahhabism's 20th-century experience has been the story of trade-offs for the sake of consolidating the position of its political guardian. The ulama gained control over education, law, public morality and religious institutions. In return, they only mildly objected to the import of modern technology and communications and did not hamper Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud's dealings with the British, non-Saudi Arabs and Americans.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 156. The gradual erosion of Wahhabi credibility has been punctuated by three major crises ....[November 1979 seizure of Grand Mosque; [2] Iraq invasion of Kuwait; [3] 9/11]

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 156. [Wahhabi clerics] dependence on the Saudi government disposed leading Wahhabi clerics to support its policies. As political discontent in the kingdom intensified, the Wahhabi establishment found itself in the awkward position of defending and unpopular dynasty.

^Kepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 179. the ulema occupy center stage in times of crisis and turn the situation to their own advantage. But the 1980s iteration of this tradition, the religious leaders called upon by the royal family to reestablish moral order were not Wahhabite clerics but were rather sahwa militants

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. xix, x. Muslims sharply disagree on this question of definition because the pivotal idea in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching determines whether one is a Muslim or an infidel. In his opinion, Muslims who disagreed with his definition of monotheism were not heretics, that is to say, misguided Muslims, but outside the pale of Islam altogether. ...
"Most Muslims throughout history have accepted the position that declaring this profession of faith [the shahada] makes one a Muslim. One might or might not regularly perform the other obligatory rituals ... but ... any shortcomings would render one a sinner, not an unbeliever.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not accept that view. He argued that the criterion for one's standing as either a Muslim or an unbeliever was correct worship as an expression of belief in one God. ... any act or statement that indicates devotion to a being other than God is to associate another creature with God's power, and that is tantamount to idolatry (shirk). Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab included in the category of such acts popular religious practices that made holy men into intercessors with God. That was the core of the controversy between him and his adversaries, including his own brother.

^Abou El Fadl, Khaled (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. p. 51. Abd al-Wahhab described the Ottoman caliphate as al-dawlah al-kufriyya (a heretical nation) and claimed that supporting or allying oneself with the Ottomans was as grievous a sin as supporting or allying oneself with Christians or Jews.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 24. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab ... insisted that invoking and making vows to holy men indeed constituted major idolatry and that it was proper to deem as infidels anyone who failed to view such practices as idolatry. ... He then stated that if one admits that these practices are major idolatry, then fighting is a duty as part of the prophetic mission to destroy idols. Thus, the idolater who call upon a saint for help must repent, If he does so, his repentance is accepted. If not, he is to be killed. [source: Ibn Ghannam, Hussien, Tarikh najd. (Cairo 1961) p.438] ... In the end, the debate ... was not settled by stronger argument but by force majeure through Saudi conquest, carried out in the name of holy war, or jihad.

^M Zarabozo, Jamaal al Din (2003). The Life, Teachings and Influence of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhaab(PDF). Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Daw'ah and Guidance. p. page 70. Ibn Ghannaam stated that at first Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhaab did not declare the Bedouins disbelievers. Only after he determined that they were truly opposed to the basic tenets of the faith did he have no other option, according to the principles of the Shareeah, to declare that they were not Muslims.CS1 maint: Extra text (link)

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 18. In 1744, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab arrived in al-Dir'iyya .... This was the origin of the pact between religious mission and political power that has endured for more than two and half centuries, a pact that has survived traumatic defeats and episodes of complete collapse.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 18. Muhammad ibn Saud declared his readiness to back the mission against unbelief and idolatry but insisted ... two conditions. ... Second, that Sheikh Muhammad approve of Ibn Saud's taxation of al-Dir'iyya's harvests. The reformer ... replied that God might compensate the amir with booty and legitimate taxes greater than the taxes on harvests.

^ abEnglish, Jeanette M. (February 2011) [2011]. "14". Infidel behind the paradoxical veil1 (first ed.). http://books.google.at/: AuthorHouse™. p. 260. ISBN978-1-4567-2810-6. LCCN2011900551. Archived from the original(Paper) on 2011-02-03. Retrieved 2012-04-11. In the last years of the 18th century, Ibn Saud attempted to seize control of Arabia and its outer lying regions and his heirs spent the next 150 years in this pursuit. This was done at the expense of the overlords of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, the house of Al Saud met with defeat at the hands of the Ottoman and Egyptian armies, resulting in the burning of Diriyah.

^Ibrahim, Youssef Michel (August 11, 2002). "The Mideast Threat That's Hard to Define". cfr.org (The Washington Post). Retrieved 21 August 2014. The Saudi minister of religion is always a member of the Al Sheikh family, descendents of Ibn Abdul Wahab. Moreover links between Ibn Abdul Wahab and the house of Saud have been sealed with multiple marriages.

^"Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi Theology". December 1992. Library of Congress Country Studies. Retrieved 17 March 2014. Muhammad ibn Saud turned his capital, Ad Diriyah, into a center for the study of religion under the guidance of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and sent missionaries to teach the reformed religion throughout the peninsula, the gulf, and into Syria and Mesopotamia. Together they began a jihad against the backsliding Muslims of the peninsula. Under the banner of religion and preaching the unity of God and obedience to the just Muslim ruler, the Al Saud by 1803 had expanded their dominion across the peninsula from Mecca to Bahrain, installing teachers, schools, and the apparatus of state power. So successful was the alliance between the Al ash Shaykh and the Al Saud that even after the Ottoman sultan had crushed Wahhabi political authority and had destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Ad Diriyah in 1818, the reformed religion remained firmly planted in the settled districts of southern Najd and of Jabal Shammar in the north. It would become the unifying ideology in the peninsula when the Al Saud rose to power again in the next century.

^... did not give his blessing to Ibn Saud's campaign of conquest,DeLong-Bas, Natana J. (2004). Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (First ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, USA. p. 35. ISBN0-19-516991-3. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab promised not to interfere with Muhammad Ibn Saud's state consolidation, and Muhammad Ibn Saud promised to uphold Ibn Abd al Wahhab's religious teachings. …
[But] there is a marked difference between noninterference in military activities and active support and religious legitimation for them. … Rather than actively supporting or promoting this conquest, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab merely 'acceded' to it, hoping that Ibn Saud would get his fill of conquest and then focus on more important matter – those pertaining to religious reform. In fact, as evidence of the lack of religious support this military conquest enjoyed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab left Ibn Saud's company altogether during this campaign, devoting himself instead to spiritual matters and prayer

^DeLong-Bas also maintains that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab waged jihad only in defense against aggressive opponents: DeLong-Bas, Natana J. (2004). Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (First ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, USA. p. 38. ISBN0-19-516991-3. Opponents of the Wahhabi movement claimed religious justification for their military actions by accusing the Wahhabis of ignorance, sorcery and lies … It was only at this point – when the Wahhabi community was threatened – that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab finally authorized a jihad as holy war to defend the Wahhabis. However, even this defensive jihad remained limited in scope, as fighting was permitted only against those who had either attacked or insulted his followers directly.

^Olivier Roy, Antoine Sfeir, ed. (2007). Columbia World Dictionary of Islamism. Columbia University Press. pp. 399–400. The history of the Al Sa'ud dynasty is, therefore, one of political expansion based on the Wahhabi doctrine. After the conclusion of the pact of 1744, Muhammad Ibn Sa'ud, who at the time ruled only the Najd village of Dir'iya, embarked on the conquest of neighboring settlements, destroying idols and obliging his new subjects to submit to Wahhabi Islam.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 38. Ibrahim's ruthless prosecution of the war, al-Dir'iyya's leveling and the exile of the emirate's political and religious leadership gave the same impression to a sojourning European as it did to Arabian Bedouins and townsmen: The Saudi emirate and the Wahahbi mission had been crushed once and for all.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 69. Wahhabism retained hegemony over Najd's religious life because of the political shelter provided by Saudi power. In turn, the Saudi realm could maintain its independence vis-a-vis Istanbul because of physical and technological factors: Its geographical isolation, its lack of valuable resources, the limits of nineteenth-century communications, transportation and military technologies made conquest and pacification too costly for both Cairo and Istanbul. These outside powers decided to leave the Saudis alone so long as they did not revive the first amirate's impulse for expansion through jihad and refrained from attacking Hijaz, Iraq and Syria.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 69. Outside of al-Qasim, the Rashidis left Wahhabi ulama in place a qadis throughout Najd, including the amirate's capital Ha'il. By the 1880s, generations of Najdi townsmen had lived in a Wahhabi milieu. The strict monotheistic doctrine had been naturalized as the native religious culture.

^"Imam Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, Ibn Saud information resource". Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab sought the protection of Muhammad bin Saud, in Ad-Dariyah, the home of the House of Saud... ... they had interests in common, pre-eminently a desire to see all the Arabs of the Peninsula brought back to Islam in its simplest and purest form. In 1744, they therefore took an oath that they would work together to achieve this end.

^Blanchard, Christopher M. "The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya"(PDF). Updated January 24, 2008. Congressional Research Service. pp. 2–3. Retrieved 4 May 2014. Since the foundation of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, there has been a close relationship between the Saudi ruling family and the Wahhabi religious establishment.3 Wahhabi-trained Bedouin warriors known as the Ikhwan were integral to the Al Saud family's military campaign to reconquer and unify the Arabian peninsula from 1912 until an Ikhwan rebellion was put down by force in 1930. Thereafter, Wahhabi clerics were integrated into the new kingdom's religious and political establishment, and Wahhabi ideas formed the basis of the rules and laws adopted to govern social affairs in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism also shaped the kingdom's judicial and educational policies. Saudi schoolbooks historically have denounced teachings that do not conform to Wahhabist beliefs, an issue that remains controversial within Saudi Arabia and among outside observers.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 102–3. What we do know is that Ibn Saud hewed to the dynastic tradition of supporting Wahhabi ulama and giving them control over religious institutions. At the same time, he tempered Wahhabi zeal when he felt that it clashed with the demands of consolidating power in Hijaz and al-Hasa or the constraints of firmer international boundaries maintained by the era's dominant power in the region, Great Britain. Simply put, political considerations trumped religious idealism. The same principle governed Ibn Saud's approach to adopting modern technology, building a rudimentary administrative framework and signing the oil concession with the Americans.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia(PDF). I.B.Tauris. p. 77. The Ikhwan pressed for strict adherence to Wahhabi norms, but Ibn Saud was willing to take a more relaxed approach to matters like smoking tobacco and worship at shrines

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 76–7. Wahhabi ulama ordered the demolition of several Shiite mosques and took over teaching and preaching duties at the remaining mosques in order to convert the population. ... some Shiites emigrated to Bahrain and Iraq. ... The intensive phase of Wahhabi coercion lasted about one year. When ibn Saud decided to curb the Ikhwan, he permitted the shiites to drive away Wahhabi preachers.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 78. Ibn Saud designated local dignitaries in Mecca and Jeddah to enforce loosely the Wahhabi prohibition of tobacco, alcohol, playing cards and the phonograph. The outcome of this approach was the preservation of a more relaxed atmosphere in Hijaz than in Najd. Standards would stiffen when Ibn Saud arrived for the pilgrimage with a retinue of Wahhabi ulama and then slacken with his departure. ...[Ibn Saud] even pioneered the use of automobiles to transport pilgrims from Jeddah to Mecca over the objections of Wahhabi ulama who considered them a prohibited innovation. In another sign of Ibn Saud's willingness to disregard Wahhabi sensibilities, he allowed Shiites to perform the pilgrimage.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 95. [the first] documented instance of a formal committee to enforces the duty dates to 1926, [when the official Saudi newspaper in Mecca published the news of its establishment]

^"The First Ikhwan Rebellion 1927-1928. Wars of the World*". Globe University. Retrieved 29 April 2014. They attacked Ibn Sa'ud for introducing such innovations as telephones, automobiles, and the telegraph and for sending his son to a country of unbelievers (Egypt). Despite Ibn Sa'ud's attempts to mollify the Ikhwan by submitting their accusations to the religious scholars ('ulama'), they provoked an international incident by destroying an Iraqi force that had violated a neutral zone established by Great Britain and Ibn Sa'ud between Iraq and Arabia (1927-28); the British bombed Najd in retaliation.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 47–9. Ibn Atiq considered the first category, those who willingly fall in with the idolaters to be infidels. ... Those in the second category are not infidels but sinners because they stay with idolaters for the sake of wealth or preserving family ties; ... it is a sin, however, to remain in their land even if in one's heart one hates the idolaters. ... Those in the third category are free of any blame. They openly practise religion or are compelled to reside among idolaters. ... For the rest of the nineteenth century strict enforcement of this aversion to mixing with idolaters—and in Wahhabi terms, most Muslims fell into that category—would remain the norm of in Wahhabi discourse.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 144. Ahl-i Hadith scholars and Wahhabis agreed that Sufis and Shiites were not true believers. The movement also shared with the Wahhabis that desire to revive the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and a tendency to express intolerance toward other Muslims (Ahl-i Hadith preachers compared Delhi's Muslims to idolaters).

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 134 quote=Alusi began a campaign against ritual innovations in Sufi orders like music, dance and veneration of saints' tombs.

^Algar, Hamid (2002). Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International. p. 46. Rashid Rida (d.1935) ... After a visit to the newly conquered Hijaz, he published a work praising the Saudi ruler as the savior of the Haramayn and a practitioner of authentic Islamic rule and, two years later, an anthology of Wahhabi treatises. [why?] ... the aftermath of World War One saw both the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate and the failure of Sharif Husay to gain either a pan-Arab kingdom or acceptance by Muslim as a candidate for a revived caliphate. It is, then perhaps, not surprising that persons of salafi tendency ... casting around in desperation for a hero, should have begun to view Ibn Sa'ud with favor and to express sympathy for Wahhabism.

^However, Rida had some liberal religious ideas and after his death his works were banned in Saudi Arabia.Abou El Fadl, Khaled (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. p. 92. Rida's liberal ideas and writings were fundamentally inconsistent with Wahhabism, and this is why after Rida's death, the Wahhabis regularly condemned and maligned Rida. … the Saudis banned the writings of Rida, successfully preventing the republication of his work even in Egypt, and generally speaking made his books very difficult to locate

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 103 quote=By the early 1950s, Saudi Arabia was by no means a modern state. ... Nevertheless, the twin pressures of controlling regions outside the Wahhabi heartland and navigating the currents of regional politics led him to take steps that punctured the seal between the internal land of belief and the outside land of idolatry.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 151–52. in the 1950s and 1960s, two dramatic shift in Arab regional and Saudi domestic politics brought Islam to the fore as an element in the kingdom's international relations. ...[1] the polarization of Arab politics between revolutionary (republican, nationalist) regimes and conservative monarchies and, [2] in the domestic realm, the assimilation of political ideologies sweeping nearby Arab lands.

^Robinson, Francis (November 2006). "review of The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: 320–322. JSTOR25188657. Then, the book [The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia] widens its focus to embrace the world beyond Arabia and to demonstrate how the Wahhabis and Islamic revivalists in the world beyond, members of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of the Ahl-i Hadith and the Jamaat-i Island, found common cause in their rejection of the West and its ways which were so deleterious of Muslim piety and values.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 153. The League also sent missionaries to West Africa, where it funded schools, distributed religious literature and gave scholarships to attend Saudi religious universities. These efforts bore fruit in Nigeria's Muslim northern region with the creation of a movement (the Izala Society) dedicated to wiping out ritual innovations. Essential texts for members of the Izala Society are Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab's treatise of God's unity and commentaries by his grandsons.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia(PDF). I.B.Tauris. p. 5. The decision to offer asylum to Muslim Brothers fleeing persecution at the hands of secular Arab regimes was part of an effort to consolidate the bastion of Islam against atheist currents. No one could have foreseen that the Muslim Brothers would successfully spread their ideas in the kingdom and erode Wahhabism's hegemony.

^"In Depth Profile: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood". 06 Feb 2011. Al Jazeera. Retrieved 29 April 2014. ... targets of state repression. When Gamal Abdel Nasser took over Egypt in 1952, the Muslim Brotherhood is said to have welcomed the coup, but this budding relationship did not last. An attempted assassination on Nasser in 1954, blamed by the authorities on elements of the Brotherhood, saw the movement face a crackdown that led to the imprisonment of Qutb and other members. In 1956, the organisation was repressed and banned and Qutb was executed in 1966. However, it continued to grow, albeit underground.

^Kepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 156. In the melting pot of Arabia during the 1960s, local clerics trained in the Wahhabite tradition joined with activists and militants affiliated with the Muslim Brothers who had been exiled from the neighboring countries of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—then allies of Moscow.

^House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. pp. 144,. In the 1960s, when Faisal became king, he championed the creation of public schools across the kingdom for boys—and also girls. The largely illiterate nation had few qualified teachers, so the government dispatched emissaries abroad, mostly to Egypt and Jordan, to recruit teachers with substantive skills who also were devout Muslims. A hallmark of King Faisal's reign was an effort to create an Islamic alliance in the Middle East to counter the Arab nationalism of Egypt's president, Gamel Abdel Nasser. When Nasser, a nationalist strongman and sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia, turned on his country's conservative Muslim Brotherhood, King Faisal welcomed those religious conservatives into Saudi Arabia as scholars and teachers, reinforcing the fundamentalist hold on the young Ministry of Education, founded in 1954 under his predecessor and half-brother, King Saud.

^ abcLacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. pp. 56–57. The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salafis and also of the dawah wahhabiya (Wahhabi mission)—to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic states. But the rhetoric of the Brotherhood dealt in change-promoting concepts like social justice, anticolonialism, and the equal distribution of wealth. Politically they were prepared to challenge the establishment in a style that was unthinkable to mainstream Wahhabis, who were reflexively deferential to their rulers, and enablers, the House of Saud. It was heady stuff for the young students of Jeddah, taking the Wahhabi values they had absorbed in childhood and giving them a radical, but still apparently safe, religious twist. They had learned of jihad at school as an instantly romantic concept—part of history. Now they were hearing of its practical possibility today, and they could even make personal contact with jihad in the barrel-chested shape of Abdullah Azzam, who gave lectures in both Jeddah and Mecca in the early 1980s. The Saudi government had welcomed ideologues like Azzam and Mohammed, the surviving Qutub, to the Kingdom as pious reinforcement against the atheistic, Marxist-tinged thinking of their Middle Eastern neighborhood. But in the process they were exposing young Saudi hearts and minds to a still more potent virus—hands-on, radical Islam.

^Kepel, Gilles (2006). The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Belknap Press. pp. 173–4. Within the kingdom itself, the Muslim Brothers obeyed the prohibition on proselytizing to Saudi subjects [but] ... contributed to discussion circles and frequented the salons held by princes ... Methodically but without fanfare, the Brothers took control of Saudi Arabia's intellectual life, publishing books that extended their influence among educators and generally making themselves politically useful while obeying the orders that kept them away from the pulpits.

^ abcHouse, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 156. Stephane Lacroix, a Saudi expert at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, sums up the battle over education in Saudi Arabia: 'The education system is so controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, it will take 20 years to change—if at all. Islamists see education as their base so they won't compromise on this.' [source: telephone interview by author Karen House]

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 201. The content analysis reveals both Wahhabi doctrine and Muslim Brothers themes. In fact, the Muslim Brother imprint on this sample of Saudi schoolbooks is striking. Apparently members of the organization secured positions in the Ministry of Education, which they used to propagate their ideas.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 112. A new Islamic university in Medina was created to train proselytizers and its regulations called for 75% of its students to come from abroad.

^Dillon, Michael R. (September 2009). Wahhabism: Is it a Factor in the Spread of Global Terrorism?(PDF). Naval Postgraduate School. David Commins, in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia ...believes that 'the ideology of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is not Wahhabi. It is instead a part of contemporary jihadist tendency that evolved from the teachings of Sayyid Qutb…in other words; Al-Qaeda belongs to an offshoot of twenty-first century Muslim revivalist ideology, not Wahhabism.' ... agrees with DeLong-Bas's conclusions that Al-Qaeda's ideology evolved with the introduction of Salafi ideas from Sayyid Qutb and other Muslim Brotherhood members.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia(PDF). I.B.Tauris. p. 172. the pronouncements and actions [of Juhayman, the leader of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure] indicated that a combustible mix of Wahhabi and modern Islamic revivalism was brewing in the niches of Saudi mosques. Exactly how and when these elements combined has not yet been established beyond the common knowledge that Saudi Arabia opened its doors to members of the Muslim Brothers fleeing repression by secular regimes in Egypt and Syrian in the later 1950s and 1960s They spread their ideas by occupying influential positions in educational institutions and circulating their literature.

^Kepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 157. In the melting pot of Arabia during the 1960s, local clerics trained in the Wahhabite tradition joined with activists and militants affiliated with the Muslim Brothers who had been exiled from the neighboring countries of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—then allies of Moscow. This blend of traditionalists and modern Islamist militants served the kingdom's interests well at first, because it countered the threat of a 'progressive', pro-Soviet Islam—the brand preached at Al Azhar University in Egypt during the Nasser regime. But eventually this volatile mixture would explode in the Saudis' hands.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 155–6. "In the 1950s and 60s .... within Saudi Arabia, official religious institutions under Wahhabi control multiplied at the same time that ulama maintained their hold on religious law courts, presided over the creation of Islamic universities and ensured that children in public schools received a heavy dose of religious instruction.

^House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 234. A former US Treasury Department official is quoted by Washington Post reporter David Ottaway in a 2004 article [Ottaway, David The King's Messenger New York: Walker, 2008, p.185] as estimating that the late king [Fadh] spent 'north of $75 billion' in his efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam. According to Ottaway, the king boasted on his personal Web site that he established 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1500 mosques, and 2000 schools for Muslim children in non-Islamic nations. The late king also launched a publishing center in Medina that by 2000 had distributed 138 million copies of the Koran worldwide.

^ abKepel, Gilles, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, p.143

^ abKepel, Gilles (2002). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by. Harvard University Press. p. 139. The summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference at Taif, Saudi Arabia, in January 1981, which had reached a consensus on the idea of launching a jihad for the liberation of Jerusalem and Palestine, refused to do the same for Afghanistan. Instead, it confined itself to calling on all Islamic states to cooperate with the UN secretary general in bringing an end to a situation that was 'prejudicial to the Afghan people.'

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 63. It is important to emphasize, however, that the 1979 rebels were not literally a reincarnation of the Ikhwan and to underscore three distinct features of the former: They were millenarians, they rejected the monarchy and they condemned the wahhabi ulama.

^ abKepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 179. in keeping with a pattern dating back to the alliance between the royal family and tribal clerics, in which the ulema occupy center stage in times of crisis and turn the situation to their own advantage. But the 1980s iteration of this tradition, the religious leaders called upon by the royal family to reestablish moral order were not Wahhabite clerics but were rather sahwa militants whose belief system was a hybrid of Salafism and Qutbist thought and whose allegiances lay outside the Saudi kingdom.

^Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 48. 'Those old men actually believed that the Mosque disaster was God's punishment to us because we were publishing women's photographs in the newspapers,' says a princess, one of Khaled's nieces. 'The worrying thing is that the king [Khaled] probably believed that as well.' ... Khaled had come to agree with the sheikhs. Foreign influences and bida'a were the problem. The solution to the religious upheaval was simple -- more religion.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 176. ... Iraq's 2 August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein's annexation of the oil-rich amirate alarmed Riyadh and Washington, in large measure because his intentions were unclear: Did he intend to push south to seize the oil fields in Saudi Arabia's Eastern province.

^DeLong-Bas, Natana J. (2004). Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (First ed.). USA: Oxford University Press,. p. 269. ISBN0-19-516991-3. For the Muslim Saudi monarchy to invite non-Muslim American troops to fight against Muslim Iraqi soldiers was a serious violation of Islamic law. An alliance between Muslims and non Muslims to fight Muslims was also specifically forbidden by the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab

^ abHusain, Ed (2007). The Islamist : Why I joined Radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left. Penguin Books. p. 246. In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. One is publicly supportive of the House of Saud, and will endorse any policy decision reached by the Saudi government and provide scriptural justification for it. The second believe that the House of Saud should be forcibly removed and the wahhabi clerics should take charge. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are from the second school.

^ abcKepel, Gilles (2002). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 220. According to the militants, there were, however, two kinds of salafist, as they defined them. The sheikists had replaced the adoration of Allah with the idolatry of the oil sheiks of the Arabian peninsula, with the Al Saud family at their head. Their theorist was Abdelaziz bin Baz... the archetypal court ulema (ulama al-balat).... They had to be striven against and eliminated. Confronted by the sheikist traitors, the jihadist-salafists had a similarly supercilious respect for the sacred texts in their most literal form, but they combined it with an absolute commitment to jihad, whose number-one target had to be America, perceived as the greatest enemy of the faith. The dissident Saudi preachers Hawali and Auda were held in high esteem by this school

^Commins, David (2006). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 6. In 2003-2004, Saudi cities were the scene of a wave of suicide bombings, killings of westerners and gun battles between Saudi security forces and militants. ... members of Al Saud decided it might be time to trim Wahhabism's domination by holding a series of National Dialogues that included Shiites, Sufis, liberal reformers, and professional women. At present, the indications are not good for true believers in Wahhabi doctrine. But as its history demonstrates, the doctrine has survived crises before.

^Rubin, Elizabeth (March 7, 2004). "The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why". New York Times. Retrieved 22 July 2014. When Saudi intellectuals began worrying aloud that Saudi mosques and schools were fostering hatred of non-Wahhabists among young men, the religious establishment—which ensures that the kingdom follows a strictly puritanical interpretation of Islamic law—reacted with righteous anger, as if its social authority were under threat. Prince Nayef defended the religious establishment and blamed instead a foreign import—the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamic political organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s—for the kingdom's problems. For years, Saudi Arabia sheltered and embraced the Brotherhood activists, and now, Prince Nayef told the press, the Brotherhood had turned against the Saudis and were destroying the Arab world.

^ ab"Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi Theology". December 1992. Library of Congress Country Studies. Retrieved 17 March 2014. Wahhabi influence in Saudi Arabia, however, remained tangible in the physical conformity in dress, in public deportment, and in public prayer. Most significantly, the Wahhabi legacy was manifest in the social ethos that presumed government responsibility for the collective moral ordering of society, from the behavior of individuals, to institutions, to businesses, to the government itself.

^Bradley, John R. (2005). Saudi Arabia Exposed. Macmillan. p. 10. ... religious police, which is feared and reviled both because of its wide reach and because its members are drawn from the lower classes. Their resentment of the rich, combined with their freedom of action, results in a dangerous combination and adds to the hardline religious social atmosphere sanctioned by Wahhabi doctrine, which is spread by clerics in the mosques and teachers in the schools, and which guides the verdicts handed down by Wahhabi 'justice' in the courts.

^ abGlasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. p. 470. Wahhabism is noted for its policy of compelling its own followers and other Muslims strictly to observe the religious duties of Islam, such as the five prayers, under pain of flogging at one time, and for enforcement of public morals to a degree not found elsewhere.

^Abou El Fadl, Khaled (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. p. 67. Wahhabis regularly flogged the residents of territories under their control for listening to music, shaving their beards, wearing silk or gold (this applied to men only), smoking, playing backgammon, chess, or cards, or failing to observe strict rules of sex segregation; and they destroyed all the shrines and most of the Muslim historical monuments found in Arabia.

^Shaykh `Abdul-`Aziz ibn `Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Al-Shaykh, The General Mufty of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. "Interpretation of dreams and being wary of expansion in this matter". Portal of the General Presidency of Scholarly Research and Ifta. Retrieved 23 March 2014. [from Fatwa] ... Moreover, the interpretation of dreams is not part of the general knowledge that, if spread among Muslims, benefits them through providing a better understanding of correct beliefs and actions. Rather, it is as the Prophet (peace be upon him) described it, i.e. Ru'yas are glad tidings. In this regard, some of the Salaf (righteous predecessors) stated: "Ru'ya pleases and never harms a believer." Having said this, the field of interpreting dreams has expanded to the extent that there are now special programs on satellite channels, phone lines that reply to inquiries from the public, columns in newspapers and magazines, and places in clubs that aim to attract people and unjustly consume their wealth. All these practices are a great evil and trifle with this type of knowledge, which is part of prophethood.

^Eltahawy, Mona (July 1, 2004). "The Wahhabi war against 'infidels' and flowers". Islam Daily. Retrieved 22 March 2014. ... a Saudi friend forwarded me a copy of a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued by senior clerics. The fatwa banned the giving of flowers when visiting the sick in the hospital. The ruling observed: "It is not the habit of Muslims to offer flowers to the sick in hospital. This is a custom imported from the land of the infidels by those whose faith is weak. Therefore it is not permitted to deal with flowers in this way, whether to sell them, buy them or offer them as gifts."

^[Mansour al-Nogaidan, a young preacher in the Sahwah (awakening) movement] Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 122. .... he continued his crusade against what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Wahhabi estaishment. A year later, in 1989, he issued a fatwa condemnning the World Youth Soccer Cup, which was being held in Saudi Arabia. Soccer was haram (forbidden), in his view, like many sports, ...

^[the leader of "The Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong" (Juhayman Al-Otaybi)] Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 12. "Everywhere Juhayman looked he could detect bidaa -- dangerous and regrettable innovations. The Salafi Group That Commands Right and Forbids Wrong was originally intended to focus on moral improvement, not on political grievences or reform. But religion is politics and vice versa .... immoral of the government to permit soccer matches,...

^House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 50. ... one Saudi sheikh issued a fatwa condemning soccer because the Koran, he insisted, forbids Muslim to imitate Christians or Jews. Therefore, using words like foul or penalty kick is forbidden. The country's grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh, rejected that fatwa and called on the religious police to track down and prosecute its author.

^Brooks, Geraldine (1995). Nine Parts of Desire. Doubleday. p. 161. [from the religious editor of the Saudi Gazette circa 1986-1995] There are legal and moral rights that become consequential on marriage. Because of their different physiological structures and biological functions, each sex is assigned a role to play in the family ... it is the husband who is supposed to provide for the family. If he cannot gain enough to support the family .. both ... may work for gain. However:

The husband has the right to terminate a wife's working whenever he deems it necessary;

He has the right to object to any job if he feels that it would expose his wife to any harm, seduction or humiliation;

^ abcGlasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. p. 470. Wahhabi doctrines and practices were imposed by the conquests although in a progressively gentler form as more urban areas passed into Saudi control. This was particularly true of the Hejaz, with its more cosmopolitan traditions and the traffic of pilgrims which the new rulers could not afford to alienate. Thus, although the sound of a trumpet calling reveille in Mecca when it was newly conquered was enough to cause riot among the Wahhabi soldiers -- music was forbidden -- such that only energetic intervention on the part of the young Prince Faysal, later King, prevented a massacre, today music flows freely over the radio and television.

^Glassé, Cyril (2003-01). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira. p. 471. ISBN9780759101906. The sign of changing times in Saudi Arabia is that the exigencies of the modern world and pragmatism have opened the door to accepting the legal precedents of the other schools. The Wahhabis consider, or previously considered, many of the practices of the generations which succeeded the Companions as bid‘ah ... these included the building of minarets (today accepted) and the use of funeral markers.Check date values in: |date= (help)

^Lacey (2009). Inside the Kingdom, Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 12. Luxuriant beards were and are the most famous badge of Salafi conviction, based on a traditional belief, which some scholars dispute, that the Prophet never trimmed his beard. ... The other badge is a shortened thobe, because the Prophet did not let his clothes brush the ground.

^Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 56. The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salfis and also of the dawah wahhabiya (Wahhabi mission) -- to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic states.

^at least one scholar (David Commins), sometimes refers to Wahhabism as the "Najdi reform movement" (p. 41), "Najdi movement" (pp. 141, 146), "Najdi doctrine" (pp. 152, 200–01), and "Najdi mission" (p. 204) in his book (Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 41,. Official Egyptian correspondence expressed sectarian hostility to the Najdi reform movement),Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 141. Nevertheless, significant differences separate the Najdi movement from the modern revivalist agenda because the former stemmed from Muhammad ibn Ad al-wahhab's distinctive views on doctrine, where as the Muslim Brothers were a reaction against European domination and cultural invasion.,Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 152. The Wahhabi leadership of the World Muslim League made it an instrument for exporting the Najdi doctrine.

^House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 235. The Eastern Province (home to the oil reserves and to the perennially ill-used and unhappy Shiite minority) and the Hejaz (site of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with their more open, international outlook) both resent the overwhelming dominance of religious conservatives from the Najd, home of the Al Saud, at all levels of national governance.

^Bradley, John R. (2005). Saudi Arabia Exposed. Macmillan. p. 58. ... Asir, and the tribal population in that region, like the liberals of the Hijaz and the Shiites of the Eastern Province, have always been reluctant partners in the Saudi state. As with the merchants of the Hijaz and al-Jouf, the tribes of Asir have never fully embraced Wahhabi doctrine. Periodic local rebellions, and a low-level struggle to keep alive a regional identity, are both testimony to that ...

^2014 population estimate of 2 million, compared to 30 million for Saudi Arabia.

^Halverson, Jeffry R. (2010). Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash'arism, and Political Sunnism. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 36. ISBN9780230106581. The Atharis can thus be described as a school or movement led by a contingent of scholars (ulama), typically Hanbalite or even Shafi'ite, that retained influence, or at the very least a shared sentiment and conception of piety, well beyond the limited range of Hanbalite communities. This body of scholars continued to reject theology in favor of strict textualism well after Ash'arism had infiltrated the Sunni schools of law. It is for these reasons that we must delineate the existence of a distinctly traditionalist, anti-theological movement, which defies strict identification with any particular madhhab, and therefore cannot be described as Hanbalite.

^ abCommins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. x. Most Muslims throughout history have accepted the position that declaring this profession of faith [the shahada] makes one a Muslim. One might or might not regularly perform the other obligatory rituals .... but .... any shortcomings would render one a sinner, not an unbeliever.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not accept that view. He argued that the criterion for one's standing as either a Muslim or an unbeliever was correct worship as an expression of belief in one God. ... any act or statement that indicates devotion to a being other than God is to associate another creature with God's power, and that is tantamount to idolatry (shirk). Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab included in the category of such acts popular religious practices that made holy men into intercessors with God. That was the core of the controversy between him and his adversaries, including his own brother.
One of the peculiar features of the debate between Wahhabis and their adversaries is its apparently static nature. ... the main points in the debate [have] stay[ed] the same [since 1740].

^"Wahhabi Theology". Saudi Arabia, Library of Congress Country Studies. Library of Congress. December 1992. The Wahhabi movement in Najd was unique in two respects: first, the ulama of Najd interpreted the Quran and sunna very literally and often with a view toward reinforcing parochial Najdi practices;

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. pp. 142–3. It is common for writers on Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to assert that he sought a social renewal of Arabia, but that characterization is never given specific substance, unless one considers ritual correctness and moral purity to constitute such renewal. The problem with such generalizations is they encourage facile comparisons with modern revivalist movements, when in fact Najd's eighteenth-century reformer would have found key elements in Hasan al-Banna's writings utterly alien.

^Esposito, John L., ed. (2003-05-15). "(entry for Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab)". The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford University Press. p. 123. ISBN9780199757268. plans for socio-religious reform of society were based on the key doctrine of tahwid

^Vogel, Frank E (2000). Islamic Law and Legal Systems: Studies of Saudi Arabia. Leiden. p. 76. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab produced no unprecedented opinions and Saudi authorities today regard him not as a mujtahid in fiqh [independent thinker in jurisprudence], but rather in da'wa or religious reawakening ... the Wahhabis' bitter differences with other Muslims were not over fiqh rules at all, but over aqida, or theological positions.

^Commins 2006, p. 12 According to Commins, Kitab al-Tawhid "has nothing to say on Islamic law, which guides Muslims' everyday lives. This is a crucial point. One of the myths about Wahhabism is that its distinctive character stems from its affiliation with the supposedly 'conservative' or 'strict' Hanbali legal school. If that were the case, how could we explain the fact that the earliest opposition to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab came from other Hanbali scholars? Or that a tradition of anti-Wahhabi Hanbalism persisted into the nineteenth century? As an expert on law in Saudi Arabia notes, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab produced no unprecedented opinions and Saudi authorities today regard him not as a mujtahid in fiqh [independent thinker in jurisprudence], but rather in da'wa or religious reawakening… The Wahhabis' bitter differences with other Muslims were not over fiqh [jurisprudence] rules at all, but over aqida, or theological positions."

^ abGlasse, Cyril (2001). The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira Press. pp. 469, 470. The Wahhabis are often said to 'belong' to the Hanbali School of Law (madhhad), but strictly speaking, like the Ahl al-Hadith ... they are ghayr muqallidun ('non-adherents'), and do not see themselves as belonging to any school, any more than the first Muslim generations did.

^"Shaykh Abd Allaah Bin Muhammad Bin Abd Al-Wahhaab on Fiqh, Ijtihaad, Madhhabs and Taqlid". wahhabis.com. n.d. Retrieved 27 April 2014. And also we are upon the madhhab of Imaam Ahmad bin Hanbal in the matters of jurisprudence, and we do not show rejection to the one who made taqleed of one of the four Imaams as opposed to those besides them... And we do not deserve the status of absolute ijtihaad and there is none amongst us who lays claim to it, except that in some of the issues (of jurisprudence), when a plain, clear text from the Book, or a Sunnah unabrogated, unspecified and uncontradicted by what is stronger than it, and by which one of the four Imaams have spoken, we take it and we leave our madhhab ... And we do not investigate (scrutinize) anyone in his madhhab, nor do we find fault with him except when we come across a plain, clear text which opposes the madhhab of one of the four Imaams and it is a matter through which an open and apparent symbol ... Thus, there is no contradiction between (this and) not making the claim of independent ijtihaad, because a group from the scholars from the four madhhabs are preceded choosing certain preferred opinions in certain matters, who, whilst making taqleed of the founders of the madhhab (in general), opposed the madhhab (in those matters).

^Ruthven, Malise (1984). Islam in the World. Penguin. p. 282. Ibn `Abd al Wahhab's fundamentalism .... led to an Khariji-style division of the world into 'us' against 'them', identifying all who failed to conform to Wahhabi tenets as 'infidels' liable to attack ....

^Dillon, Michael R. (September 2009). "Wahhabism: Is it a Factor in the Spread of Global Terrorism?"(PDF). NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL. p. 13. The intertwining of Saudi political/military power and Wahhabi religious power strengthened this legitimacy, as Wahhabism (or Wahhabiyyah) claims to represent the only orthopraxy Islam.

^"analyses wahhabism". PBS Frontline. Wahhabi Muslims believe that their sect is the real true form of Islam, and that pretty much any other kind of way of practicing Islam is wrong." [according to Ahmed Ali, 'a Shi'a Muslim who grew up in Saudi Arabia']

^ abHusain, Ed (2007). The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left. Penguin. p. 250. My Saudi students gave me some of their core texts from university classes. They complained that regardless of their subject of study, they were compelled to study 'Thaqafah Islamiyyah' (Islamic Culture), .... These books were published in 2003 (after a Saudi promise in a post-9/11 world to alter their textbooks) and were used in classrooms across the country in 2005. I read these texts very closely: entire pages were devoted to explaining to undergraduates that all forms of Islam except Wahhabism were deviation. There were prolonged denunciations of nationalism, communism , the West, free mixing of the sexes, observing birthdays, even Mother's Day

^Khalid, Ahmad Ali (July 20, 2011). "Petro-Islam’ is a nightmare scenario". Wisdom Blow. Retrieved 1 April 2014. Saudi textbooks are filled with references to hate; the Islamic Studies curriculum in the country is simply barbaric. I've experienced first-hand being taught by an Islamic Studies teacher in one of the most prominent private schools in Riyadh, about the dangers of having non-Muslims as friends and about the evil conspiracies hatched by Christians, Jews and Shias.

^Abou El Fadl, Khaled (2005). The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. Harper San Francisco. pp. 49, 50. Significantly, Abd al-Wahhab also insisted that it was a sign of spiritual weakness for Muslims to care for or be interested in non-Muslim beliefs or practices. Pursuant to a doctrine known as al-wala` wa al-bara` (literally, the doctrine of loyalty and disassociation), Abd al-Wahhab argued that it was imperative for Muslims not to befriend, ally themselves with, or imitate non-Muslims or heretical Muslims. Furthermore, this enmity and hostility of Muslims toward non-Muslims and heretical had to be visible and unequivocal. For example, it was forbidden for a Muslim to be the first to greet a non-Muslim, and even if a Muslim returned a greeting, a Muslim should never wish a non-Muslim peace.

^Christopher M. Blanchard (January 24, 2008). "The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya"(PDF). Congressional Research Service. p. CRS-5. The Saudi Arabian government has strenuously denied the above allegations. Saudi officials continue to assert that Islam is tolerant and peaceful, and they have denied allegations that their government exports religious or cultural extremism or supports extremist religious education.14 In response to allegations of teaching intolerance, the Saudi government has embarked on a campaign of educational reforms designed to remove divisive material from curricula and improve teacher performance, although the outcome of these reforms remains to be seen. Confrontation with religious figures over problematic remarks and activities poses political challenges for the Saudi government, because some key Wahhabi clerics support Saudi government efforts to de-legitimize terrorism inside the kingdom and have sponsored or participated in efforts to religiously re-educate former Saudi combatants.

^House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 27. Not only is the Saudi monarch effectively the religious primate, but the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam that he represents instructs Muslims to be obedient and submissive to their ruler, however imperfect, in pursuit of a perfect life in paradise. Only if a ruler directly countermands the comhandments of Allah should devout Muslims even consider disobeying. 'O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. [surah 4:59]'

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 180. Ibn Baz submitted a memorandum to apologize for the Letter of Demands' tone and for publishing it at all rather than adhering to the customary Wahhabi principle that counsel to a ruler should be private.

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 62. For the Wahhabi ulama, however, the succession struggle raises an unprecedented and knotty issue: namely, which candidate to support. Part of the problem lay in the ulama's tendency to accord allegiance to the ruler, regardless of how he came to power, as long as he declared support for Wahhabism. But some ulama insisted on a strict juridical view that branded a rebel against the legitimate ruler (imam) as a usurper

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 115. Since believers owe the ruler obedience, he is free to organize government as he sees fit as long as he does not cross that line. While this appears to grant unlimited powers to the ruler, the proviso for respecting shari'a limits is significant, since it includes, in Wahhabi doctrine, respect for the independence of qadis in matters within their jurisdiction. Hence, the ruler may not interfere in their deliberations. Building on this limitation on a ruler's power, the ulama have preserved their autonomy in the legal sphere by refusing to participate in the codification of law and the formation of a uniform system of law courts. ... In matters before religious courts, Vogel found a striking degree of independence wielded by qadis because their mandate is not to follow precedent or implement a uniform code, but to discern the divine ruling in a particular incident.

^Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom : Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 56. The ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood were similar to those of the Salafis and also of the dawah wahhabiya (Wahhabi mission) -- to reestablish the order of Allah and to bring about the perfect Islamic states. But the rhetoric of the Brotherhood dealt in change-promoting concepts like social justice, anticolonialism, and the equal distribution of wealth. Politically they were prepared to challenge the estabishment in a style that was unthinkable to mainstream Wahhabis, who were reflexively defferential to their rulers, and enablers, the House of Saud.

^Glassé, Cyril. The New Encyclopedia of Islam. AltaMira. p. 471. The creed of Wahhabism centered upon the principle called tawhid, the assertion of Divine Oneness. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had written a book by this name .... but what he actually understood by Tawhid was the exclusivenss of the Divine Reality, and not the oneness that encompasses everything, which is the usual meaning of the term in Islamic metaphysics. Moreover, Wahhabis do not take into doctrinal consideration any opinions other than those expressed by the generation of the Prophet and his companions and those of the generation immediately following. Therefore Wahhabism precludes the principle of ijma` ("consensus") as a basis of shariah .... The legal approach of Wahhabism is in many respects unique, but it coincides most closely with the school of Ibn Hanbal, and may be considered a kind of Hanbalism, although the Wahhabis would deny this, and any other, affiliation. The sign of changing times in Saudi Arabia is that the exigencies of the modern world and pragmatism have opened the door to accepting the legal precedents of the other schools. The Wahhabis consider, or previously considered, many of the practices of the generations which succeeded the Companions as bid‘ah... these included the building of minarets (today accepted) and the use of funeral markers.

^Ibn Taymiyyah. Sharh-Al-Aqeedat-Il-Wasitiyah. Dar us Salam Publications. The followers of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah occupy a moderate position between the Ahlut Ta'teel (Jahmiyyah) and Ahlut Tamtheel (Mushabbiha), and are moderate between the Jabariyah sect and the Qadariyah sect regarding the Acts of Allah, and are moderate about the Promises of Allah between the Murji'ah and the Wa'eediyah sects among Qadariyah and are moderate on matters of the Faith and names of the religion between the Harooriyah and Mu'tazilah, and between the Murji'ah and Jahmiyah and are moderate regarding the Companions of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, between the Raafidah and the Khawarij.

^ abCaryle Murphy (15 July 2010). "A Kingdom Divided". GlobalPost. Retrieved 6 May 2014. First, there is the void created by the 1999 death of the elder Bin Baz and that of another senior scholar, Muhammad Salih al Uthaymin, two years later. Both were regarded as giants in conservative Salafi Islam and are still revered by its adherents. Since their passing, no one "has emerged with that degree of authority in the Saudi religious establishment," said David Dean Commins, history professor at Dickinson College and author of "The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia."

^Coolsaet, Rik. "Cycles of Revolutionary Terrorism, Chapter 7". In Rik Coolsaet. Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge: European and American. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. The proliferation of brochures, free qurans and new Islamic centres in Malaga, Madrid, Milat, Mantes-la-Jolie, Edinburgh, Brussels, Lisbon, Zagreb, Washington, Chicago, and Toronto; the financing of Islamic Studies chairs in American universities; the growth of Internet sites: all of these elements have facilitated access to Wahhabi teachings and the promotion of Wahhabism as the sole legitimate guardian of Islamic thought.

^Kuan Yew Lee; Ali Wyne. Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and .. MIT Press. But over the last 30-odd years, since the oil crisis and the petrodollars became a major factor in the Muslim world, the extremists have been proselytizing, building mosques, religious schools where they teach Wahhabism ... sending out preachers, and having conferences. Globalizing, networking. And slowly they have convinced the Southeast Asian Muslims, and indeed Muslims throughout the world, that the gold standard is Saudi Arabia, that that is the real good Muslim.

^Algar, Hamid (2002). Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International. pp. back cover. Wahhabism, a peculiar interpretation of Islamic doctrine and practice that first arose in mid-eighteenth century Arabia, is sometimes regarded as simply an extreme or uncompromising form of Sunni Islam. This is incorrect, for at the very outset the movement was stigmatized as aberrant by the leading Sunni scholars of the day, because it rejected many of the traditional beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam and declared permissible warfare against all Muslims that disputed Wahhabi teachings.

^ abAlgar, Hamid (2002). Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International. pp. 33–34. [Algar lists all these things that involve intercession in prayer, that Wahhabi believe violate the principle of tauhid al-`ibada (directing all worship to God alone)]. all the allegedly deviant practices just listed can, however, be vindicated with reference not only to tradition and consensus but also hadith, as has been explained by those numerous scholars, Sunni and Shi'i alike, who have addressed the phenomenon of Wahhabism. Even if that were not the case, and the belief that ziyara or tawassul is valid and beneficial were to be false, there is no logical reason for condemning the belief as entailing exclusion from Islam.

^ abKepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 159. the alliance concluded in 1744-1745 between Abdul Wahhab and the tribal chief Muhammad bin Saud, who ruled over the oasis of Diriyya ... in the Nejd, the peninsula's central desert province. (In Arabic, najd is any area where water disappears into the sand.) A Hobbesian state of perpetual war pitted Bedouin bribes against one another for control of the scarce resources that could stave off starvation. In exchange for Bin Saud's adherence to the strict dogma of Ibn Taymiyya, Abdul Wahhab offered to consecrate the Saudi tribe's raids on neighboring oases by renaming those raids jihad -- holy war to promote, by the sword, Islam's triumph over unbelief. In place of the instinctive fight for survival and appetite for lucre, Abdul Wahhab substituted fath, the 'opening' or conquest of a vast territory through religious zeal.

^Schwartz, Stephen (2002). The Two Faces of Islam. Doubleday. p. 79. During this period [of Wahhab jihad against the Ottoman Empire] Britain acquired a client in southeast Arabia: Oman, a state with sovereignty over Zanzibar in African and parts of the Iranian and neighboring coasts. Britain also expanded its influence northward into the area now known as the United Arab Emirates. In the other direction, the British subjugated Aden, on the southern Yemen cost in 1939. Yet remarkably enough, Wahhabi violence was almost never turned against the encroachments of this aggressive Christian power; the fanatics seemed concerned only with destroying the Ottomans. For this reason, anti-Wahhabi Muslim writers have repeatedly denounced them as a tool of the British ..." (p.79)

^Algar, Hamid (2002). Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International. pp. 38–9. The first contact was made in 1865, and British subsidies started to flow into the coffers of the Saudi family, in ever growing quantity as World War One grew closer. The relationship fully matured during that war. In 1915, the British signed with the Saudi ruler of the day, Abd al-Aziz b. Sa'ud (Ibn Sa'ud), one of the those contracts with their underlings that were euphemistically known as 'treaties of friendship and cooperation'. Money was, of course, the principal lubricant of friendship and cooperation, and by 1917 the Saudi ruler was receiving 5000 pounds a month ... the British also graciously saw fit to confer a knighthood on the champion of Wahhabism .... in 1935, Abd al-Aziz b. Sa'ud was made a Knight of the Order of the Bath."

^Commins, David (2009). The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. I.B.Tauris. p. 59. "Abd al-Latif, who would become the next supreme religious leader ... enumerated the harmful views that Ibn Jirjis openly espoused in Unayza: Supplicating the dead is not a form of worship but merely calling out to them, so it is permitted. Worship at graves is not idolatry unless the supplicant believes that buried saints have the power to determine the course of events. Whoever declares that there is no god but God and prays toward Mecca is a believer.

^quotes from a study "based on a year-long study of over two hundred original documents, all disseminated, published or otherwise generated by the government of Saudi Arabia and collected from more than a dozen mosques in the United States". New Report on Saudi Government Publications at the Wayback Machine (archived October 2, 2006)